Napa Valley, California, USA

A lovely springtime view from the USA I received last year from a Year of the Horse stamp swap. Just look at the colours here!

Napa Valley AVA is an American Viticultural Area located in Napa County, California, United States. Napa Valley is considered one of the premier wine regions in the world. Records of commercial wine production in the region date back to the nineteenth century, but premium wine production dates back only to the 1960s.

The combination of Mediterranean climate, geography and geology of the region are conducive to growing quality wine grapes. John Patchett established the Napa Valley's first commercial vineyard in 1858. In 1861 Charles Krug established another of Napa Valley's first commercial wineries in St. Helena. Viticulture in Napa suffered several setbacks in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including an outbreak of the vine disease phylloxera, the institution of Prohibition, and the Great Depression. The wine industry in Napa Valley recovered, and helped by the results of the Paris Wine Tasting of 1976, came to be seen as capable of producing the best quality wine – equal to that of Old World wine regions. Napa Valley is now a major enotourism destination.

Muir Woods National Monument, USA

Moving on to North America. This gorgeous card is from a swap with Katie in the USA earlier this year. The main point of this card was actually the cherry blossom stamps, but I really like the card itself, too.

Muir Woods National Monument is a unit of the National Park Service on the Pacific coast of southwestern Marin County, California, 19 km north of San Francisco and part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. It protects 224 ha, of which 97 ha are old growth Coast Redwood forests, one of a few such stands remaining in the San Francisco Bay Area.