For more than a year now they had been searching: on the highway, near the river, atop oaky knolls that rose abruptly from the valley floor, up wild canyons, and along the spines and scarps of two rugged coastal ranges. What they were looking for was not easily put into words, but the quality of the ideal was absolute and unassailable in their minds. They were searching for ... They would know it when they found it.

They didn't want a hut in the woods. They didn't want a roadside attraction. They didn't want one of those Victorian piles built in homage to Europe, with too many rooms and too much view (views could be just as pretentious as architecture) and strange names like Chateau Montelena, Chateau Chevalier, Freemark Abbey — white elephants all, and all for sale, with weeds in the yards and blank windows staring back into the illusions of the founders.

The couple's name was Davies, and the fact that these near-ruins existed in an agricultural backwater given over to prune and walnut trees, pastures and some vines, intrigued them. The valley, named for the Napa River that flowed through it, was still tenuously connected to a process going back thousands of years and halfway round the world, to the Transcaucasus, south of the Caspian Sea, where similar vines clung to rocky ledges and the grapes were once placed in earthen pots, and the substance that came of them, wine, made its way down the Euphrates, through Egypt, Greece, imperial Rome, and France, to arrive at this redoubt in northern California sometime in the previous century.

Now, in the spring of 1964, Napa Valley was about to achieve something unique in America — again. Wine, lately considered the dubious beverage of immigrants, made in basements, would soon be transformed into a symbol of high culture, and winemakers would be heralded as artists. The owners of wineries themselves would be celebrated as a new class. These self-made baronets — formerly real estate speculators, developers, academics, brokers, dentists, oilmen, and purveyors of products as varied as frozen food and feature films — would put their names on bottles, tacitly associating themselves with an older order and an endeavor above ordinary commerce. They would invite the public into a romantic association not unlike that involving movie idols and real royalty.

The children of these "vintners" would grow up on little fiefdoms, accustomed to the sight of workers among the vines and to the pleasures of life far from the raucous cities and suburbs their parents had left behind. They would reject the unsavory methods of earning the money required to have brought about such a change in their families' fortunes. Some would seek to turn the land into tourist attractions, increasingly urged to exploit the place. Finally, the valley would take on a gloss that had more to do with money than with the product for which it became famous; it would be transformed into a paradigm of material ambition and dissent, threatened by the very brilliance of the imprint it left on the world.

No one had yet thought of these things in 1964. The Davieses — he of the quizzical smile, she of the pale green, catlike eyes — had more immediate concerns. They would, of course, be influenced by history and the natural beauty, but also by practical considerations like sufficient living space, plantable land, a decent bam, good water — all part of a daring, maybe harebrained scheme to get out of Los Angeles.

The Davieses, like many people in the country at that time, sought to change their way of life. The dim notions of freedom they brought with them to Napa Valley, and many of the problems they encountered, were representative of a broader exodus. Jack was the vice president of acquisitions for a large, privately held metals distributor. At forty-two, he had a solid reputation as a businessman; he was methodical and judicious. Those qualities augured against the scheme for escaping, and if it became reality, he was going to have some very surprised associates.

His wife, Jamie, thirty, wore her blond hair short. The breadth of her smile left people with the impression that they were talking to a taller person. To her, the vineyards of Napa Valley, the parched hills against the deep green of oak and conifer and the arching blue sky, seemed timeless and dense with promise.

The house had been vacant for quite a while, the real estate agent warned them as they drove up a narrow defile on the eastern slope of the Mayacamas Mountains. It was spring, and hot. The riven road jarred the car and offered up its dust. Jamie Davies could no longer see the thrust of Mount St. Helena off to the right, at the top of Napa Valley, but she could see water running in the streambed — a good sign — and big eucalyptus, redwoods, madrona, and oak trees leaning into one another. Wild vines grew in tangles in the branches, their canes extending clear across the road. The property had once belonged to a German barber in San Francisco named Schram, who came up a century before and fell in love with the setting. He had made wine there but the vineyards had gone to seed since Prohibition, overrun by the same wild vines, poison oak, and impenetrable red-stalked manzanita.

The land was steep, but then the Davieses wanted hillside property. To the south lay a state park, another plus Then Jamie saw the house. It was made partially of stone and commanded a kind of courtyard, with an old winery on one side, a mountain on the other, and a porch that turned the corner. Victorian, all right, but not a pile. Robert Louis Stevenson had stayed there, the real estate agent said, and had written about the place in a book called Silverado Squatters

He led them up the steps and into the old house. Drapes blocked the light from tall windows; covered furniture stood mutely in the shadows. Jamie felt a palpable tug from a previous age and knew that Jack felt it, too.

They were shown tunnels in the mountain, full of bats. Schram's tunnels had been dug by hand. Jamie could see old bottles lying about in the gloom, and collapsed barrels that had once held aging wine. Schram had wandered the valley with razor and shears, shaving frontiersmen and cutting hair to support his nineteenth-century obsession.

They talked about it all the way back to L.A. Their excitement seemed a bit irrational to Jamie. For starters, the property was too big. They would have to invite friends in as investors, lots of friends, if they tackled it. The house was only half painted; none of the rooms was fit to live in. Animals romped in the walls. The plumbing was a disaster and rain came through the ceiling. The winery needed a new roof. There were no vineyards. And those tunnels! A wonder of individual human industry, full of junk.

Jamie found a copy of Stevenson's Silverado Squatters. The writer had visited Napa with his new wife in 1880. Jamie lingered over his description of the...