You steal away to the top of a winding hillside road, a consonance of olive trees and climbing brush bordering your car’s ascent. Secreted past a curl of pretty residences, there appears a warm little inn. You’re greeted cheerfully, the stone fountain burbling quietly as you pass beneath the shaded entry to the golden corridor within. It’s a short few steps to the righthand conical bistro, and an anticipatory few more until you arrive on the terrace suspended above a brilliant patchwork of soldierly vines and cloudless sky. It is only natural that the Valley light would look most brilliant through the prism of the ‘house of the sun’. Once you take your front row seat and have your inaugural glass of wine in hand, something allows you to settle into feeling ‘away’. And it is when you feel you’re in another world entirely – completely and wholly transported – that you know you’ve arrived in Napa.

Photography: Helen Brooks

© Essential Moment: A Separate Place | Auberge Du Soleil