'The Silverado Squatters'

'The beginning of vine-planting is like the beginning of mining for precious metals: the wine-grower also "prospects." One corner of land after another is tried with one kind of grape after another. This is a failure; that is better; third is best. So, bit by bit, they grope about for their Clos Vougeot and Lafite.

'Those lodes and pockets of earth, more precious than the precious ores, that yield inimitable fragrance and soft fire, those virtuous Bonanzas where the soil has sublimated under sun and stars to something finer, and the wine is bottled poetry...'

[Napa thoughts by poet, novelist and travel writer, Robert Louis Stevenson]