NONFICTION - July 16, 1995

DREAMS OF THE VALLEY: A Portrait of the Napa Valley by Cheryll Aimee Barron (Scribner: $25; 317 pp.). If you take travel books on faith--especially literary works that profess to illuminate the soul of another culture--consider picking up this volume as a necessary corrective. “Dreams of the Valley” is probably as accurate as the typical travel book, but reading it is like getting a tour of one’s back yard by someone who’s just moved to town. Barron, a Bombay native educated in Britain, has not gone native, despite having lived in Northern California since 1981; fascinated by the Napa Valley’s being populated by immigrants like herself, she is an outsider commenting on natives, arrivistes and other outsiders, and this layering of perspectives can be disorienting. Alternately repelled and entranced, condescending to and envious of, the valley residents she meets, Barron profiles, among others, the unpleasant “goblin- gargoyle” Joe Heitz; Beaulieu’s ground-breaking former winemaker Andre Tchelistcheff; the conservative Davies family behind Schramsberg champagne; and a smattering of recent, rich, often social-climbing immigrants. Unlike most wine writers and wine makers, Barron is interested in wine as a cultural phenomenon rather than a process, and the result is that she sometimes seems to misunderstand her subjects or simply alienates them; it’s no surprise she gets along best with members of the struggling Martini wine family, who put on no airs at all, and a Domaine Chandon employee who lives with a Mexican field hand. All in all, though, Barron’s instinctive desire to deflate a few over-large valley egos is right on target. When Barron hopes to meet some grape pickers at a fall celebration, the highlight of which is a south-of-the-border meal intended to honor the Mexican labor, she’s told without irony, “Oh, they aren’t here. They are working. It’s the harvest, you see.”