NAPA, Calif. — Craving an escape to France and Italy, but can’t afford the airfare? A long weekend in California’s Napa Valley is the next best thing.

Nowhere else in North America will you find such a high level of fine wineries, outstanding restaurants, elegant resorts and cutting-edge artistic expression, concentrated into a valley that is only about 35 miles long and no more than five miles wide.

An hour’s drive north of San Francisco and Oakland (when traffic doesn’t interfere), Napa is flanked on the east and west by ranges of hills that rise 2,500 feet and higher above the valley floor. Its main town of Napa, with a population approaching that of Bend (77,000), is near the southern end of the valley. Extending north between the sprawling vineyards are the quaint towns of Yountville, St. Helena and Calistoga, each with a character of its own.

When I visited in mid-November, the autumn grape harvest had concluded; rains were teasing the fields, but bright fall colors still lined the roads. Vintners and their culinary colleagues were in a mood of celebration, making it a great time to stop into the region’s legendary wineries and renowned restaurants.

The wine industry

There are over 400 wineries in the Napa Valley. Most Napa visitors — more than 8 million annually — focus on those with entrances off state Highway 29, the region’s principal north-south route.

These number in the dozens and include many of the valley’s largest and best-known wineries, including Robert Mondavi, Beringer, Sutter Home, Cakebread and Freemark Abbey.

But 80 percent of Napa’s wineries produce fewer than 10,000 cases of wine a year — a far cry from the 15.4 million annual case production of Trinchero, the valley’s largest producer. Many of these artisan companies are on the Silverado Trail, which runs up the east side of the valley, or along the myriad side roads that climb the hills and cross the lowlands. With 95 percent of Napa wineries family-owned and operated, according to winemaker Michael Mondavi, it should perhaps not come as a surprise that only 4 percent of all California wines are produced in the Napa Valley.

Speaking at a Wine Tourism Conference session in Napa, Mondavi recalled a time in the late 1960s when he literally drove business to the tasting room at his late father Robert’s winery; he would build a line of traffic behind a slow-moving tractor on Highway 29 and lead them to the tasting room.

It wasn’t until the mid-1970s that Napa achieved a worldwide reputation for the quality of its wines, particularly cabernet sauvignon and chardonnay. The seminal event occurred in 1976, when a chardonnay from Chateau Montelena won an international tasting competition in Paris (as depicted in the 2008 movie, “Bottle Shock”).

Chateau Montelena still revels in that triumph. DVDs of the movie are sold in the gift shop of its 125-year-old stone headquarters, sitting atop a wooded bluff north of Calistoga. The chateau overlooks a Chinese garden built before the winery was purchased in 1972 by Jim Barnett — who was portrayed in the movie by actor Bill Pullman. Barnett and his son, Bo, played in the movie by Chris Pine, still work at the winery at least five days a week.

Montelena is a mid-sized winery, producing 40,000 cases annually. A 2007 chardonnay will cost you $55; a cabernet from that same year will set you back $135.

Tasting-room visits

I thoroughly enjoyed my visit to the Von Strasser Winery, near the foot of Diamond Mountain southwest of Calistoga. Like many of the small family operations of which Michael Mondavi spoke, it is open by appointment only.

When I arrived, I found Rudy von Strasser at work in his 10-year-old wine cave — 8,000 square feet of temperature-controlled tunnel behind a vintage 1870 barn. The first Californian ever to work at France’s famed Chateau Lafitte winery, von Strasser bought a century-old wine estate in 1990, planted seven vineyards with 60 acres of wine grapes, and established a 50-kilowatt solar array to provide all the electricity the winery requires.

“The big wineries on (Highway) 29 aren’t really Napa,” von Strasser told me. “That’s tourist Napa. If you’re serious about wines, you need to get off the highway to see what the small producers are doing.”

His estate certainly qualifies. Production is fewer than 5,000 cases per year. But that includes numerous award-winning cabernets — and the first vintage of Gruner Veltliner (an Austrian varietal) to be produced in United States.

Some of my other off-the-beaten-track wineries are Schweiger, Judd’s Hill, Stag’s Leap, Quintessa and the Michael Mondavi Family Estate. But if you’re looking for a combination of quality wines and low prices, turn back to Highway 29. The Trinchero-owned Napa Cellars, incorporating Folie à Deux and Ménàge à Trois, offers a wider selection of both reds and whites, priced under $20, than any other Napa winery I visited.

Another worthwhile “tourist” stop on Highway 29 is St. Supéry. Climb the stairs above the extensive tasting room and gift shop to find a “smell-a-vision” display, breaking down the aromatic elements of a red cabernet sauvignon (earth, leather, wild cherry) and a white sauvignon blanc (grass, floral, citrus) into characteristics distinguishable in the nose and on the tongue. Adjacent, a self-guided interpretive walking tour of the winery operation leads visitors on a catwalk overlooking hoppers and presses, oak barrels and stainless-steel tanks where varietals ferment.

Fine dining

But wine is best enjoyed with food, and few locations are as suited to that guilty pleasure as the Napa Valley.

My November visit coincided with the Flavor! Napa Valley food-and-wine festival, based mainly at the Culinary Institute of America (CIA) at Greystone, on the north edge of St. Helena.

This impressive facility, the largest freestanding stone building in California when it was built in 1889, originally served as a cooperative wine cellar for the valley’s vintners. From 1950 to 1989, it was owned by the Christian Brothers, a Catholic teaching order that made sparkling wine. Today it houses the West Coast campus of the CIA. Visitors can enjoy a lively culinary store and marketplace, an in-house restaurant and a whimsical corkscrew collection of more than 1,800 wine openers, some dating from the 1700s.

Events during the Flavor! festival showcased many of the valley’s top chefs, with cooking demonstrations by Thomas Keller (The French Laundry, Bouchon), Cindy Pawlcyn (Mustard’s Grill, Brassica), Christopher Kostow (Meadowood), Masaharu Morimoto (Morimoto Napa), Philippe Jeanty (Bistro Jeanty) and Ken Frank (La Toque), to name but a few.

Frank, who was a frequent visitor to Bend’s Sagebrush Classic fundraiser, was as outspoken as he was entertaining as he demonstrated how to cook black and white truffles. “If everything is better with bacon, everything is really better with duck fat!” he counseled several dozen onlookers watching him slice and saute the truffles as he prepared an egg-and-ravioli dish.

La Toque’s five-course, prix fixe, French-influenced menu, served at the Westin Verasa Hotel in downtown Napa, makes it an immensely popular restaurant. But probably no restaurant in America gets the constant acclaim, nor the requests for reservations, as Keller’s French Laundry in downtown Yountville. If you’re not on the phone at 10 a.m. exactly 60 days before you hope to dine there, you won’t get a table. And that meal won’t come cheap: $275 per person for a nine-course meal, not including wine pairings.

I dined once at the French Laundry, many years ago, and it still lingers in my memory as perhaps the best restaurant meal I’ve ever had. But with so many other choices available in Napa, I was pleased to try the work of other chefs.

Bistro Jeanty, located just down the street from the Laundry, is outstanding — and very French. Owner-chef Philippe Jeanty serves dishes like pieds de cochon persillés (a salad of pigs’ feet and haricots verts) and rognons de veau (veal kidneys with a green peppercorn sauce). For the less adventuresome, there are escargots, coq au vin and pork shoulder.

Fish Story, in downtown Napa, established by well-known Bay Area chef Bradley Ogden, specializes in Pacific seafood according to Monterey Bay Aquarium sustainability guidelines. The cioppino was superb.

But I think I enjoyed my dinner at PRESS more than any other on this visit. After viewing so much competition and one-upmanship between chefs in the food events, chef Stephen Rogers’ straightforward approach to fine food was refreshing. I had a butter-lettuce salad with vinaigrette and a dry-aged steak with sauteed Brussels sprouts. It was not fancy, but it was superb, and the service matched the food every step of the way.

For less expensive bites, Gott’s Roadside — with locations in downtown Napa and in St. Helena — is a long-stand ing local favorite. This is a place where visitors can stand in line with locals and get a hearty burger for $7 to $10.

The arts scene

There are few collections of art that I enjoy as much as the Di Rosa. A 217-acre indoor-outdoor preserve in the Carneros region southwest of the town of Napa, this remarkable domain owes its existence to the late René di Rosa.

The scion of a well-to-do East Coast family, di Rosa came to San Francisco in the early 1950s and began supporting undiscovered Beat-era artists by purchasing their work. In 1960, he bought an abandoned 460-acre vineyard and converted the 1886 stone winery into his home. Over the years, the personal collection that he and his artist wife, Veronica, amassed grew to more than 2,200 paintings and mixed-media works by 800 late-20th-century Bay Area artists: William T. Wiley, Jay de Feo, Elmer Bischoff, Joan Brown and Deborah Butterfield among them.

Styles, media and subject matter vary widely, reflecting a history of the city’s late-20th-century creative energies. Much of the collection is avant-garde or whimsical; other pieces, like an outdoor meditation chapel (in which the Dalai Lama once drew a sand mandala), are dramatic and thought-provoking.

Di Rosa, who died last year at age 91, opened the preserve to visitors in 1997. At its heart is Winery Lake, the focus of a 45-acre nature preserve whose most prominent feature is a colorful cutout cow sculpture (by Veronica di Rosa) dubbed “Endless Summer.” Visitors approach the collection at its new Gatehouse Gallery, from where shuttle buses carry small groups to the main buildings of the preserve. Appointments are recommended.

Downtown Napa, originally settled in 1832, has seen a flurry of recent gentrification beside the Napa River, along First and Main streets. The Napa ARTwalk, installed this fall and scheduled to run into the spring of 2013, features 14 modern sculptures by artists from four Western states. Art on F1rst features another 20 Bay Area artists in street-side installations. And there’s more to see hanging on the walls of the Napa Mill and Hatt Market, at Main and Fifth, and in the hip Oxbow Public Market, near the Napa Valley Wine Train depot on First Street east of downtown.

Taking the waters

At the north end of the valley, Calistoga is home to the Ca’Toga Galleria d’Arte, a remarkable piece of classical Italy transported to the Wine Country. Venetian fresco artist Carlo Marchiori brings animal and Commedia dell’Arte themes to his eclectic collection, which is highlighted by a painted terrazzo floor (featuring a chart of the pre-Copernican universe) and a barrel-vaulted ceiling (depicting mythical constellations). Marchiori also has painted the walls of a downtown Calistoga alley, and he sells tickets for tours of his private estate, Villa Ca’Toga.

Nearby is the Sharpsteen Museum, which features a collection of miniature dioramas, created by original Disney animator Ben Sharpsteen, that re-create scenes from Calistoga’s colorful past.

The town, not with 5,000 residents, was founded in 1859 as a resort where San Francisco weekenders could “take the waters”; thermal activity has resulted in a proliferation of geysers and medicinal hot springs. The town founder, heavy-drinking newspaper editor Sam Brannan, is said to have named it after the hot-springs resort of Saratoga, N.Y., by confusing its syllables when under the influence — he called it “the Calistoga of Sarifornia.”

Intrigued by Calistoga’s famed mud baths, I took the plunge in the Baths at Roman Spa. Changing from my street clothes into a terrycloth robe, I was ushered into a malodorous room where two tubs — one of them square and tiled, the other a Jacuzzi bath — stood upon a concrete floor.

I was directed to disrobe and immerse myself in the tiled tank, which was filled with brown mud so thick it was impossible to see past the surface. With no small degree of trepidation, I slowly settled into the mix of volcanic ash, natural peat and geothermal water. The mineral content, I was later told, included sulfate, calcium, chloride and sodium bicarbonate, but to me, it was “muck.”

I reclined in this 104-degree stew for about 20 minutes. An attendant occasionally came by to adjust the support pillow beneath my neck or to place a cold compress on my forehead. Finally, I showered thoroughly and slipped into the Jacuzzi for another long soak before getting dressed.

Despite my initial hesitance, the hour of hydrotherapy had left me feeling relaxed and rejuvenated. I recommend a mud bath to any curious Calistoga visitor.

Lodging options

Where to stay in the Napa Valley? There’s European-style luxury galore at such resorts as Meadowood Napa Valley and Auberge du Soleil. The Silverado Resort and Spa is another elegant property with considerably lower rates. More than three dozen charming bed-and-breakfast inns are located throughout the valley; I have been delighted on past visits at Napa’s Victorian-style Beazley House, the valley’s original B&B.

Many major chains are represented, among them Best Western, Embassy Suites, Fairfield, Holiday Inn, Quality Inn, TraveLodge and Westin. On this visit, I enjoyed my room at the midpriced Marriott Napa Valley Hotel & Spa, a newly renovated property with its own fine-dining restaurant, VINEleven, under the direction of chef Brian Whitmer.

At the lower end, with rates under $100, are such motels and inns as the Chardonnay Lodge in downtown Napa and the valley’s original ma-and-pa, the El Bonita Motel in St. Helena. And if you’ve got the family dog along, you may want to check out Chien Blanc in Calistoga. The name means “White Dog” in French, and its three bungalows welcome four-legged companions.