Napa Nest

ST. HELENA, Calif. â€”  The “wine countryâ€� is by now such a California institution that it’s hard to visit the Napa and Sonoma valleys without feeling as if you’re perpetuating a cliche: Book oneself and one’s flame into a cuddly, precious bed and breakfast with the requisite fascistic innkeeper; drive a perky Pontiac rental to a delirium of tasting rooms; then awaken hung over the next morning to begin the ordeal anew.

Which is what I was expecting the first weekend of 1997 as we motored north from the San Francisco airport to St. Helena (ignoring the imprecations of nearly everyone that all of Northern California was under water). St. Helena is a relentlessly tasteful town that somehow resists calling itself the Heart of Napa Valley. Approaching on California 29 at twilight, I flipped on the rented Chevy’s brights and beheld an amazing procession of winery entrances: Mondavi, Trefethen, Domaine Chandon, Cakebread, St. Supery, Beaulieu, Niebaum Coppola--all the big boys.

I’d always pictured the wineries of Napa strewn attractively over hill and dale; in fact, more than 50 are squeezed between the city of Napa on the south and St. Helena and Calistoga on the north. The proximity of so many tasting rooms accessible only via winding two-lane roads creates nightmarish traffic jams in St. Helena during the autumn harvest. But in the post-Christmas doldrums, tourists are scant, t hotel rates are down, and the valley resembles what it is: an agricultural jewel, asleep for the winter.

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Our destination was the Inn at Southbridge, a 21-room luxury hotel on the edge of downtown St. Helena that opened in late 1995. The inn fills a gap in Napa Valley accommodations between ultra-high-end resorts such as the Auberge du Soleil, or the Meadowood (which operates the Inn at Southbridge), and the valley’s ubiquitous bed and breakfasts.

The Inn at Southbridge weekend room rates start at $245 until April, when they ascend to $275, then $295 in July. But the hotel is a class act and a good value.

All the rooms are on the second floors of a newly constructed Italianate two-story complex that also houses offices and the restaurant Tomatina, which provides room service. Some rooms are situated uncomfortably close to California 29 and an abuilding health spa on the property, to be completed in June, is surely a distraction during the week. There’s also limited staff; desk clerks double as helpful and knowledgeable concierges. I’ve seen this arrangement at more and more upscale hotels in places like Santa Fe, Mill Valley and now, St. Helena: a room that equals the comfort and sophistication of nearby full-service resorts for $100 less, minus frills such as 24-hour room service that require a lot of expensive help.

Our goal for the weekend was to explore Napa Valley without haunting the winery tasting rooms, so we pointed the trusty Chevy north. The Martha Stewart-ish perfection of St. Helena is nowhere to be seen in Calistoga, famous for its natural hot springs and bottled mineral water (the downtown probably looks pretty much the way it did in the ‘70s).

In a when-in-Rome flourish, we pulled into Calistoga’s Indian Springs spa. And almost pulled right back out. Indian Springs claims it is the oldest continuously operating thermal pool and spa in California, and from the outside it looks like a faded Depression-era motor court. But inside was spotless and peopled with friendly, fetching staff. My girlfriend took a mud bath in the women’s spa, which entails lowering oneself into an iron tub rugged enough to smelt copper and being buried to the neck in shovelfuls of hot volcanic ash and mud. Afterward there’s a soak in a mineral water bath, a few minutes in the steam room, and a blanket wrap complete with cucumber slices over the eyes. (I opted for all of the above, minus the mud bath but adding a half-hour massage.) We both came out feeling porous and quite glad we’d gone in after all. Privacy freaks beware: All of the above takes place in the company of your naked fellow customers.

One of the niceties of the Napa Valley is that you’re never more than 10 minutes or so from where you want to go next. Which for us was the ponderous-sounding (and looking, in the no-stone-too-large H.H. Richardson fortress style) Culinary Institute of America, just north of St. Helena. The CIA, as the St. Helena Star newspaper unironically refers to it, is housed in the former Greystone winery. Professional chefs and would-be chefs come from all over the world to train here, so it would follow that its Greystone restaurant would turn out a pretty darned good lunch. And where else can you wander in from the highway at 1:30 p.m. and get grilled oyster-mushroom bruschetta and warm quail salad with walnuts? Best meal of the weekend, by a mile.

With French Laundry, the Napa Valley’s swanky restaurant-of-the-moment, still closed for the holidays, we had a late supper Saturday night at Pinot Blanc, the wine country branch of L.A.’s Patina restaurant. The dinner was fine but hardly exceptional. But the prices aren’t bad, and the clubby dark-wood interior offers a welcome refuge on a cold Northern California night.

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Sunday morning, we wandered St. Helena’s downtown on Main Street--an easy walk from the hotel. St. Helena Antiques had impressive, if expensive, vintage French Provencal pottery, and R.S. Basso home furnishings stocks well-priced furniture and accessories that approximate Northern California’s urban-country-sophisticate look.

After a fast lunch at the Auberge du Soleil bar (burgers, Merlot and a jaw-dropping view of the Rutherford viticultural region), we couldn’t resist visiting Francis Coppola’s Niebaum-Coppola winery. Last year, the filmmaker purchased the remaining acres of the original 1879 Gustav Niebaum vineyards he didn’t own, and with them the gorgeous stone Inglenook winery building, to which he’s added a tasting room and store, opened in November. Coppola’s ambitions have seldom been constrained by budgets, and his winery is rampant with cost-be-damned tastefulness and a movie-maker’s sense of showmanship.

Four hours later, we descended into Burbank amid the most ferocious turbulence I have experienced in 20 years of flying--a molar-rattling finish to a weekend that seemed to promise little unexpected and ended up putting the color back in our cheeks.

Walker is an editor for Los Angeles Times Magazine.

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Budget for Two

Air fare: $160.00

Rental car: 94.00

Hotel, two nights: 484.00

Lunch, Auberge du Soleil: 45.00

Culinary Institute lunch: 50.00

Dinner, Pinot Blanc: 81.00

Indian Hills Spa treatments: 55.00

FINAL TAB: $969.00

The Inn at Southbridge, 1020 Main St., St. Helena, CA 94574; tel. (800) 520-6800. St. Helena Chamber of Commerce; tel. (707) 963-4456.