USA

CaliforniaNapa Valley

Locator map — Napa Valley, USA — Locator map — schematic, not to scale.

Napa is Burgundy and Bordeaux's opposite in the most useful way: young, small, and largely built by people who came from somewhere else.

Grapes have grown there since the 1830s, but Napa as a fine-wine name is really a late-20th-century story — ambitious estates, often backed by outside money and expertise, setting out to prove California could stand up to Europe's best.

Dominus is a clean example. Christian Moueix, of the Bordeaux Pomerol family behind Petrus, first saw Napa's old Napanook vineyard in 1981 and recognized land that reminded him of home.

He partnered with the family who'd owned it for generations, released a first vintage in 1983, took full ownership in 1995, and built a striking Herzog & de Meuron-designed winery around it in 1997.

Old vines, new money, European pedigree on American dirt. That's Napa's actual formula.