Napa, USA is one of four sister cities of Launceston, Tasmania.
Those of us who live in Napa, California, are often entertained by its persona in the world beyond our city limits. Yes, it’s the largest city in Napa County — although it’s not that big, with 79,000 residents in a county of 140,000 —and yes, we make some pretty good wine in this valley with some 500 wineries, but the notion that we are all sitting on the verandas of our Tuscan-style mansions, sipping our Cabernet, and watching the grapes grow, doesn’t quite fit most of us.
Letter to the Editor
As tourists began coming to Napa Valley in the 1970s, they zoomed past the exits to “Napa” heading to the upvalley wineries. Napa remained what it had been for decades, the quiet, blue-collar town, known more for its state mental hospital than any tourist attractions. (In high school, at football games, the visiting teams called us “the Napa Nuts.”)
This changed in the early 21st century when the Army Corps of Engineers addressed an annual problem: whenever we got much-needed rain in winter, the river that runs through Napa would flood, wreaking havoc. With the completion of the flood control project, new businesses ventured into town; art galleries, p restaurants, multi-story hotels, elegant shops and more than 50 wine-tasting rooms opened in the past two decades. And tourists followed.
Napa now has attractions like Copia, a campus of what we call “our CIA,” the Culinary Institute of American, and the Oxbow Public Market (named for a kink in the Napa River). The BottleRock music festival alarmed locals when it was first proposed, but today it draws as many locals as it does visitors.
Locals still love the pink and white Buttercream Bakery that has been in town for 50 years, and the January crab feeds are a tradition that supports the towns’ many non-profits, serving everything from animal welfare to helping the homeless.
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Once a staunchly conservative and mostly White town, today at least 40% of the population is Hispanic, many of them recent immigrants who are the backbone of the wine and hospitality businesses, the basis of our current prosperity. Slowly, the separation of these two communities is lessening.
Gone are the days when locals gazed in awe at the city’s first escalator and joked that Napa rolled its sidewalks up at 6 p.m., yet, at heart it remains a small rural town where, as my son observed, “You couldn’t ever get away with anything because someone’s mother would see you and call your mother.”
