Napa Valley Cooking Class

A visit to the Napa Valley today would not be complete without a meal at one of its fine restaurants. Some of the world’s best chefs call Napa home, but this was not always the case. Though hard to imagine now, on its first visit to Northern California wine country in the 1970s, Condé Nast labeled the region “a culinary desert.”

This posed a problem for the early winemaking families of Napa Valley, who, having often fallen in love with wine while traveling through Europe, understood wine in the context of food, as a historical accompaniment to a memorable meal with family and friends. Unfortunately, while Napa wines began to distinguish themselves in faraway cities like New York, London, and Paris when people from these places came to visit the Napa Valley, they found that the quality of the local cuisine rarely lived up to the quality of the wines.

And so a quiet revolution began in the private kitchens of the Napa Valley. A cottage industry of amateur chefs began to take advantage of the agricultural bounty of Napa, inspired by their own travels as well as the phenomenon of Julia Child. Recipes and techniques were traded, and soon there were delicious, rustic, French-inspired meals to be found in Napa, but only if you were invited to the family table. Ever magnanimous, the tight-knit winemaking community were central figures in the growing community of Napa gourmands, and they started to host not only dinner parties but cooking demonstrations, where they would show off their new tricks. In 1973, Catherine and Janet Trefethen offered up a permanent place to host this semi-occasional gathering: a newly-built open kitchen next to a covered patio adjacent to the family home which Catherine named “La Villetta”. For the next twenty-five years, the Napa Valley Cooking Class was a fixture at Trefethen.

This small gathering was central to the rise of a new Napa cuisine as extraordinary as the rise in Napa wine. As Napa vintners traveled the world selling their wine, they made friends with chefs who were often the wine buyers for their restaurants. Inevitably, they would be invited to Napa, and while in town, they would be asked to share their knowledge. And so Cindy Pawlcyn, Jeremiah Tower, Wolfgang Puck, Charlie Trotter, Michael Chiarello, Thomas Keller, and so many others stepped over the threshold into the little Villetta kitchen at Trefethen and experienced something quite uncommon in those days – a crowd of people passionate to learn about cooking. Many of these great talents fell in love with the beauty of Napa and the hospitality of the community and decided to stay, to make it their home, too.

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In 1990 Janet Trefethen showed the world what she had learned from all these luminaries when she cooked Julia Child Christmas dinner on Good Morning America. “I was terribly intimidated,” she said. “Right until I met her. Then I recognized that she was one of us, someone who just loved food, loved wine and loved learning. She loved life! Her enthusiasm was infectious, which is why she was so good on TV. She was one of the most genuine people I’ve ever met.”

The Trefethen family’s passion for cuisine extends through the generations, and through the company. Hailey and Lorenzo Trefethen are both avid cooks and Hailey manages La Huerta, a one-acre garden that provides Trefethen employees and Winery Chef Chris Kennedy with over 15,000 pounds of fresh vegetables and fruit every year. She also organizes the annual salsa competition amongst Trefethen employees, and manages Trefethen’s relationship with The French Laundry, who have a large vegetable garden on the property. Chef Kennedy was the first chef in Napa to create a restaurant concept based around wine and food pairing and continues to hone his art, elevating the experience of wine tasting at the Trefethen Estate.

And Catherine’s Villetta still stands, tucked into a corner of the estate gardens where every so often, a friendly chef will step over the threshold and reveal the magic of their craft.