From Alila, it’s a 10-minute walk to downtown St. Helena and plenty of shops and restaurants. But the hotel offers free car service to anywhere in the valley. I headed to Nickel & Nickel to meet a buddy from Berkeley, and we worked through the winery’s catalog on the Queen Anne-style farmstead in Oakville that the founders of Far Niente restored from an 1880s property. Founded in 1997, the winery was among the first in Napa to focus exclusively on single-vineyard, single-varietal wines, meaning each bottle is tied to one specific site. We stuck mostly with the reds, landing on a favorite: the Hawk’s Cradle Cabernet Sauvignon, made from grapes grown on Howell Mountain, the valley’s smallest AVA.
