“The Napa Valley, Then and Now: The Evoltion of Grapegrowing and Winemaking” was the title of a seminar I took this past summer at the Society of Wine Educators Conference in Orlando, Florida with Barry Wiss. With the cold weather outside, I am channeling summer and warmth and so Napa came to mind. The seminar was interesting but what I thought was most remarkable was how far the association has come that they are now showing the diversity of terroir, grapes grown and attention to microclimate variations.

I tended to think of Napa as a whole, homogenous region, with a warm climate. I was quite wrong apparently. This above all was made plain in this particular seminar. In the past, I have taken the Napa Rocks seminars about the soil variation but little had been discussed about climate, another fundamental part of what can be defined as “terroir.”

Terroir affects…