Town Rankings / California

The Best Golf Courses in Napa

Napa sells wine first and everything else second, which means its golf has spent decades as the morning activity before the afternoon tastings. That undersells a small, coherent scene: one resort with two courses and a PGA Tour stop, two public courses routed through actual vineyards, and summer weather that might be the best in California golf, warm days in the valley, cool enough mornings to walk. Golf here is not the headline. It is better than the supporting act it plays.

Four courses, all public or resort, no private gate to argue about. We score the golf first, then the day, then value, and in Napa the day includes what happens after the round more than anywhere else in this series. We will try to keep that from corrupting the order. Mostly.

1Silverado Resort North Course

The North Course at Silverado hosts the PGA Tour's Fortinet stop, and Johnny Miller owned and redesigned it, and says so, which tells you both that the course carries tour weight and that it carries it with a tour player's ego fully intact. Miller jokes aside, the North is a serious parkland test: oak lined, water in the right places, greens that have handled Sunday pins with a trophy on the line.

The concession is that parkland in wine country will never win a beauty contest against the coast or the desert, and some holes run together in memory. But it is the only course in Napa the best players in the world have to solve each year, and it solves a few of them. First place is not a debate here.

2Silverado Resort South Course

The South Course is the North's sibling and the resort guest's second round, similar ground, similar trees, a slightly friendlier examination. It benefits from everything Silverado does well, conditioning, service, and a setting in the hills at the valley's edge that beats the flat valley floor courses for scenery.

Second place is both fair and faint praise. The South exists in a shadow and knows it, and a visitor with one Silverado round should spend it on the North without a moment's hesitation. With two rounds, the South earns its place as the most relaxed good golf in town, the round before the long winery lunch.

3Eagle Vines Golf Club

Eagle Vines routes its holes through vineyards at the southern end of the valley, and the setting is the selling point: you play between the vines, literally, on ground that grows the region's other product. As an experience it is the most Napa round on this list, more than either Silverado course, which could be resorts in several states.

The golf ranks third because experience is not the first category. The layout is solid rather than memorable, and a few holes lean on the vineyard framing to do work the design should do. Play it anyway. Some courses are ranked on their best hole. Eagle Vines is ranked on its best photograph, and in Napa that logic is harder to dismiss than it should be.

4Chardonnay Golf Club

Chardonnay Golf Club completes the vineyard pair, a public course through the vines in the valley's southern corridor, walkable in spirit, friendly in price, and built for the golfer who wants the wine country round without the resort bill. It is the locals' answer on this list and it fills that role happily.

Fourth on design, and the gap to Eagle Vines is smaller than the gap above either of them. The conditioning can vary with the season, and the layout asks fewer hard questions. But as the budget entry in a town that specializes in emptying wallets, Chardonnay holds an honorable place, and its 18 holes among the vines beat a tasting room stool for a morning, every time.

One scheduling truth governs all of it: play early. Napa mornings are the best golf weather in this entire series of towns, cool and still, and by mid afternoon the valley belongs to the tasting rooms anyway. A 7 a.m. tee time at Silverado and a noon reservation up valley is not a compromise between two hobbies. It is the correct order of operations, and the courses here have been quietly built around it for years.

Napa golf knows its place in the trip and plays it well: serious at the top, scenic in the middle, honest at the bottom. The valley pours afterward. It always did.