July 16, 1999: San Francisco and The Golden Gate
	July 14, 1999: Waterfalls in Yosemite
	Return to the Index for Our California Trip

Today, we'll leave Modesto and drive northwest towards the Napa Valley. I've not been there before, and was interested to see what the wineries and vineyards looked like. We will end the day by checking into a hotel in San Francisco and doing some walking about the city.

Driving to the Napa Valley

When we awoke at our motel northeast of Modesto, we stopped to have some breakfast and plan how to get to Napa.

I wanted to avoid retracing the route we'd driven four days ago to get to Yosemite from the San Francisco Airport, so I looked at our map and we decided to go east for just a ways and then north through the central valley on one of the major routes (California 99 as it turned out).

This brought us to Lodi, California, where we turned east towards the town of Fairfield- California Highway 12. I remember that there was a lot of construction going on, and we had to follow our noses to continue east to hook up with the highway that goes up through the Napa Valley- California 128/29.

When we got into the town of Napa, we stopped at a place that offered tourist information to ask what might be a good winery for us to visit, perhaps one representative of the valley and one that offered tours.

We were given a few choices, and finally settled on the Beringer Winery (since the label name was familiar to Fred) which was a few miles north in the town of St. Helena. We got back in the car and continued northwest to that small town and found the winery with little problem.

As it turned out, the Beringer Winery was a good choice, and we got to see quite a good bit of it.

The Beringer Vineyards and winery is a large operation here in the valley. Founded in 1875, Beringer Vineyards was "the oldest continuously operating winery in the Napa Valley", and is thus listed under both the National Register of Historical Places and as a California Historical Landmark. It was the first California winery to offer public tours after Prohibition's repeal.

In 1939, Beringer invited attendees of the Golden Gate International Exposition to visit the winery using promotional maps printed with the phrase "All roads lead to Beringer". The winery also invited Hollywood stars including Clark Gable, Charles Laughton, and Carole Lombard to visit. These early promotions are considered to be the birth of wine-based tourism that is now a large part of Napa Valley's economy.

The Beringer family sold the Beringer name and winery to Nestlé in 1971. It sold off the company in 1996 to a group lead by Texas Pacific Group; the company went public the next year, and owned it at the time of our visit. (Next year, the winery would be sold to Foster's Group, and in 2011 would be bought by a wine conglomerate named Treasury Wine Estates.

The first thing we did on our arrival was to go to the spot where we could sign up to take a short tour of the operation; this kiosk was right beside the main house.

Our actual tour of the winery was pretty interesting, although there is not much to one save for the vineyards, the pressing rooms, the casking and bottling rooms and the aging rooms. Here at Beringer, much of the operation takes place in a series of rooms carved out of an adjacent hillside (which might actually have been artificial) that we entered through large wooden doors. The rooms were large and cavernous, and not well-lit, so the flash wouldn't have been much of a help in taking candid photos inside. That's why there aren't any here. We did take a couple of additional pictures outside- one of a window set in the stone facade of these rooms, as well as the plaque outside indicating that the Beringer Winery is a California historic landmark.

The tour actually continued into the main house and offices of the winery. Outside, we passed a large circular fountain that we took some pictures of. You can see those pictures here and here.

The tour finished up in one of the tasting rooms inside the house. The room had a long bar and some tables and offered visitors the chance to sample or purchase some of the wide variety of Beringer wines. While Fred was sampling some of the wines (I don't care for myself) we admired the numerous stained-glass windows around the room and on the ceiling- and took some pictures of them. You can see some of those pictures here, here and here.

Arriving in San Francisco

When we had finished up in the Napa Valley, we drove leisurely into the city of San Francisco. I took the opportunity to show Fred some of the sights around the bay, and we came into the city via the Oakland Bay Bridge, checking into our hotel on Taylor Street near Eddy. After we checked in, we took BART out to the Castro to walk around and have some dinner.

You can use the links below to continue to another photo album page.

	July 16, 1999: San Francisco and The Golden Gate
	July 14, 1999: Waterfalls in Yosemite
	Return to the Index for Our California Trip