3 Best Sights in Napa and Sonoma, California

Sharing a 19th-century Victorian with a ground-floor wine bar, this free, well-organized mezzanine-level museum surveys the Napa Valley's wine-growing origins with fascinating memorabilia and tools of the trade. Among the latter include now taboo farm implements like "soil injectors" used to blast insecticides into the soil. Under the wine bar's Baccarat chandelier, guests can transition their education into the present by purchasing a payment card and proceeding to stations dispensing 2-, 4-, or 6-ounce self-serve pours. Three popular strategies are selecting Cabernets from a single Napa Valley AVA, comparing ones from several subappellations, or sampling a few 100-point wines.  You don’t need to taste to tour the museum, which is next door to Oakville Grocery.

The rare manuscripts, first editions, photographs, childhood toys, and other artifacts at this small museum document the life and literary career of Robert Louis Stevenson (Treasure Island, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde). One exhibit examines the months Stevenson, at the time impoverished, spent in an abandoned miners' bunkhouse north of Calistoga in what's now Robert Louis Stevenson State Park. The interlude inspired the author's book The Silverado Squatters. Check before visiting to make sure the museum will be open, as staffing is sometimes an issue.

Walt Disney animator Ben Sharpsteen, who retired to Calistoga, founded this old-school but compelling museum whose centerpiece is a diorama depicting the Calistoga Hot Springs Resort during its 19th-century heyday. A restored cottage from the resort, moved to this site, sits next door to the museum but is entered through it. Other exhibits survey life in Calistoga through the decades and author Robert Louis Stevenson's time here in 1880.