Convertible on the Trail. Polaris over the Rockies. OVID at 1,800 feet on volcanic ash — and the tea leaf salad that will reconfigure your sense of what a salad is allowed to accomplish.
You pick up the convertible at SFO before 9am, take the bridge east while the bay is still deciding whether to be gray, and hit Highway 29 just as the valley starts making its case. The sensible move is Silverado Trail — locals take it, the view is better, there are no stoplights until Calistoga — but for the first hour, with the top down and the Mayacamas rising on your left, even the tourist route feels like a defensible choice.
The Napa Valley is at least two places at once. There’s the one they sell: $42 flatbreads, tasting rooms staffed by people who use the word “terroir” at a volume designed to carry across the room, the ambient sense that you’re paying to perform the experience of caring about wine. And then there’s the valley underneath it — found at Stony Hill on a Spring Mountain appointment, at the Oakville Grocery counter with a paper bag of provisions and nowhere particular to be, on Pritchard Hill where OVID grows Cabernet on volcanic ash at 1,800 feet and doesn’t advertise anything to anybody.
San Francisco is the thing you do before and after, and it is more than enough. The original Burma Superstar on Clement Street makes the tea leaf salad that will reconfigure your sense of what a salad is allowed to accomplish. Roxie’s Food Center on San Jose Avenue in the Outer Mission serves lunch the way lunch should be served: fast, no ceremony, better than you were expecting. The bay and the cable cars and the bridge are right there when you want them. You probably don’t want them first.
35,000 miles. A flat bed over the Rockies. Full day on the ground by 10am.
United runs Polaris Business on its East Coast transcons, and the JFK–SFO route is the cleanest domestic business class redemption in the program. The ask: 35,000 MileagePlus miles one-way for a lie-flat seat, a real meal service, and roughly four hours of not sitting in a middle seat beside someone’s emotional support carry-on. The evening westbound departure gets you on the ground in the morning with the full day ahead — enough time to clear the rental counter and be on Silverado Trail by 10am.
Chase Ultimate Rewards transfers to MileagePlus at 1:1, immediately, no waiting period — your Sapphire balance converts directly and spends the same day. Alaska Mileage Plan is the dark horse for anyone flying Alaska or American metal to SFO: partner awards can surface at 25,000 miles one-way in first on the right inventory days, and Alaska’s program still prices by distance rather than by whatever the algorithm feels like that morning.
The Chase Sapphire Reserve earns 3x on all travel and dining, and a week that includes Press, Ashes & Diamonds, Angele, and a Pritchard Hill appointment will generate meaningful points before you’ve processed the first bill. The real move is watching for Chase-to-MileagePlus transfer bonuses, which surface occasionally and have historically run 30–40 percent — when they appear, move that day.
Fred McCrea planted Chardonnay on this hillside in 1943 — which is to say he was farming Napa Chardonnay before the category existed, before anyone had agreed on what it was supposed to taste like, and before the market was offering to reward him for any of it. His family still owns the land. They still don’t irrigate. They still skip malolactic fermentation entirely.
The result — grown on rocky, volcanic-influenced soils above 800 feet on Spring Mountain, picked for balance rather than score, aged in mostly neutral oak — tastes like it was made by people who were never particularly interested in what the market wanted, and aged into something the market eventually came to want anyway.
Serve it at 46 to 48 degrees and leave it in the glass for ten minutes before forming any opinions. It moves from taut green apple and white flower into something broader and more generous without ever losing the seam of acidity that keeps the whole thing organized. This is not a butter wine.
Stony Hill sells the majority of production through a direct mailing list at stonyhillvineyard.com — worth joining now for next year’s allocation. In the Bay Area, K&L Wine Merchants in San Francisco stocks it when available; Kermit Lynch Wine Merchant in Berkeley carries it sporadically.
Anything where richness would be precisely the wrong call. The 2021 is drinking well now and has five comfortable years ahead of it.
Angele Restaurant & Bar has been the most honest brasserie argument in the Napa Valley for over twenty years — the steak frites haven’t changed, the room fills on a Tuesday, and the Sancerre-by-the-glass situation is considerably better than it has any right to be in a valley that is mostly trying to sell you something red and expensive.
The Napa to Sonoma Half Marathon registration opens in January and closes within days — 13.1 miles through the valley floor with a winery finish and wine at the line is a genuinely compelling pitch, but the harder argument is convincing yourself to train for it while also conducting the level of field research that a trip to this valley properly requires.
OVID’s white blend, Experiment — a technically ambitious mix from Pritchard Hill fruit — is the more interesting bottle if you secure the appointment: less discussed than the Hexameter, harder to find at retail after release, and usually still available at the winery at the exact moment you’d expect it not to be.
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