Tasting the Good Life

Five million visitors a year travel to California's Napa Valley to experience the good life: to taste fine wines, eat fine food, and immerse themselves in other sophisticated pleasures while surrounded by bucolic beauty. Tourism is the world's largest employer, and tourists today want to experience the world through all five senses. Tasting the Good Life tells the story of Napa tourism through the words of the tourists who visit and the men and women who provide the products and services they rely on. The stories of 17 people -- from winemaker to vineyard manager, from celebrity chef to wait staff, from hot air balloonist to masseuse -- provide extraordinary insight into this new form of tourism and its impact on an iconic American place.

George Gmelch is Professor of Anthropology at the University of San Francisco and at Union College. He is author of eleven books and numerous articles, many of which have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, and Psychology Today, Society, and Natural History. Sharon Bohn Gmelch is Professor of Anthropology at the University of San Francisco and Roger Thayer Stone Professor of Anthropology at Union College. She is author of seven books, including Nan: The Life of an Irish, Traveling Woman, The Tlingit with Photography, and Tourists and Tourism.