AUVERS-SUR-OISE, France

MARYAM RAJAVI, a wide-eyed woman who goes by the title president-elect of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, is eager to talk about the latest discovery by her spies: mile-long tunnels, large enough to drive trucks into, dug into the mountains outside of Tehran.

“There are at least 14 to 15 tunnels of this magnitude that have been built secretly,” she said, sitting in a cream-colored reception room on the cramped grounds of her compound here. She suggested that the tunnels were hiding elements of a clandestine nuclear weapons program that the United States suspects exists but that inspectors have yet to find.

It would be easy to dismiss Mrs. Rajavi as a self-serving political zealot in a powder-blue suit with matching head scarf and shoes, except that her group has been right before.

In August 2002 the group, which says it has thousands of followers based in Iraq, announced that Iran was pursuing a secret uranium enrichment program that could be used in building a nuclear bomb. The information turned out to be true and led to the current standoff over Iran’s nuclear development program. The group’s many subsequent disclosures have been either less significant or plain wrong.

The sleepy town of Auvers-sur-Oise, 20 miles northwest of Paris, is best known as the place where van Gogh lived the last months of his life. Japanese and American tourists wander uncertainly down its main street, peering at reproductions of his paintings in front of the buildings that they portray. Few of the tourists are aware that the town is now home to an almost cult-like Iranian opposition group, some of whose members have divorced their spouses as an act of loyalty to the cause and whose armed wing is on the State Department’s list of foreign terrorist organizations. The group’s devotion to Mrs. Rajavi is so extreme that some members set themselves on fire when she was briefly detained by the French police two years ago.

Mrs. Rajavi, 52, favors color-coordinated outfits that bring out the blue in her pale gray eyes and has a broad, almost impish smile that threatens to spill into laughter at almost any moment. She grew up in Tehran as the daughter of a middle-class civil servant descended from a member of the Qajar dynasty, which ruled Iran for 125 years before a 1921 coup by Reza Khan, an army officer, led to his election as hereditary shah four years later and the establishment of the Pahlavi dynasty.

THE family opposed the Pahlavis’ rule, and Mrs. Rajavi said her own activism began in earnest when she was 22 after her sister, Narges, was killed by the shah’s secret police. Mrs. Rajavi soon joined the Mujahedeen Khalq, or People’s Holy Warriors, an association of leftist students formed in 1965 that became one of the most active groups opposing Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.

Mrs. Rajavi gradually rose in the ranks of the mujahedeen and, after the shah’s overthrow in 1979, she married a fellow member and had two children. But the family fled to France after the Islamic government of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini turned against the mujahedeen and began executing its members. Mrs. Rajavi said another of her sisters, who was eight months pregnant, was killed in the crackdown.

In Paris, Mrs. Rajavi worked closely with the mujahedeen’s charismatic leader, Massoud Rajavi, whose first wife, Ashraf, had also been killed in Iran. Mr. Rajavi’s second wife was the daughter of Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, Iran’s progressive president in the early days following the shah’s fall. His second marriage ended after he and Mr. Bani-Sadr had a falling out in exile. Mrs. Rajavi said her own marriage to Mr. Rajavi, in 1985, was a calculated political move.

“My responsibility against the mullahs’ regime and against Khomeini drove me to the conclusion that I couldn’t have the same normal marital relationship that people in ordinary lives would have,” she said. “So it was my own very definitely political decision.”

Mr. Rajavi was expelled from France in 1986 and moved to Iraq, where he established a military camp named after his first wife. He was last seen shortly before the American invasion and, according to the mujahedeen, he is presumed to be in hiding from Iranian assassination squads. Mrs. Rajavi will say only that she is sure he is alive. In the meantime, she is in charge of the exile group.

In her small, leafy compound squeezed between the town’s soccer field and the Oise River, Mrs. Rajavi and about 100 followers pursue their single-minded goal of overthrowing the fundamentalist Islamic theocracy in Tehran and installing a government of their own with Mrs. Rajavi as president until new elections can be held.

None of Mrs. Rajavi’s answers are short or immediately to the point. She speaks volumes on a Castro-like scale, though her message remains a narrow one: that the organization has been unfairly labeled a terrorist organization out of the West’s misguided efforts to engage the Iranian government, and that the only real hope to effect change in Iran short of war is to support her organization and give it free rein.

She presents herself as a beacon of progressive Islamic politics, the antithesis, as she puts it, of the fundamentalist Shiite mullahs running Iran. But the rigidity of her organization and extreme devotion of its members has given the organization a fanatical cast.

HER smile takes on a steely glint when she discusses the mass divorces ordered by the group’s leadership, which split the movement’s families in 1989 and sent their children into foster care abroad. The policy has focused energy on the cause instead of personal relations, she said.

“Our members can’t have, because of the circumstances, the normal marital status in life that everyone else in the world can enjoy,” Mrs. Rajavi said, arguing that the movement faces a “ferocious” enemy and followers cannot afford to be distracted.

To illustrate her point, she opened a thick book filled with photos of people she says were supporters of the movement who were killed by the Iranian government. There are 21,676 names in the book, just a sixth of the “martyrs” that her organization claims to date.

“Every single member of this movement sincerely believes in the goal of democracy and has made sacrifices for it,” Mrs. Rajavi said, her smile never wavering. “I don’t call this fanaticism.”

Only on the subject of the self-immolations by some members does she concede that devotion to the cause has sometimes been misdirected. After the police took her into custody in July 2003 during an investigation of the group, several followers set themselves on fire. Two died.

“I was extremely saddened by those deaths,” she said, but she blamed the French authorities for not letting her speak to the demonstrators who had gathered to protest her arrest. She said the followers believed that she and her followers were going to be deported to Iran, “so they felt that there was nothing else that they could do.”

Many critics say the organization is reviled in much of Iran for having sought shelter with Saddam Hussein’s government in Iraq, but Mrs. Rajavi says that is not so. She denies that the movement ever accepted financial support from Iraq or fought against Iraqi Shiites and Kurds on Mr. Hussein’s behalf, as some people claim. As evidence of her organization’s continuing viability, she cites the group’s revelations about Iran’s secret nuclear activities.

“This is the result of a resistance movement having a very wide social base and having deep roots and being present in all sectors of Iranian society,” she said, leaning back and opening her hands.

Mrs. Rajavi’s French residence permit expires in 2006. While her aides say she has been given permanent political-refugee status in France, that has not been confirmed by French officials. Iraq, meanwhile, has inserted a clause in its draft constitution that prohibits political asylum for “those accused of committing international or terror crimes,” making the group’s future welcome there uncertain.

Still, Mrs. Rajavi keeps smiling.

“I’m optimistic,” she said. “It may not happen in my generation, but eventually the mullahs will go.”

WHEN Steve G. Bernath, 32, an engineer from San Jose, Calif., visited a friend in Scottsdale two years ago, he expected a sleepy community full of “golf fanatics and blue-haired women,” he said. But a weekend of clubbing quickly changed his mind. “I was in awe actually as far as the night life,” he said.

And he was back last weekend with 14 pals for a friend’s bachelor party. “It’s hip,” he said, beer in hand, surrounded by a gaggle of women in the pool at the year-old James Hotel. “It’s happening. There’s definitely a stepped-up night life.”

Hip? Happening? Scottsdale? Long associated with golf, grand dame resorts and retirees, this suburb of Phoenix is fast on its way to becoming a hipster hot spot. Nightclubs, chic hotels, trendy bars and restaurants that cater to a young, fashion-conscious crowd have been popping up.

Party central is the James, a joint project of the New York restaurateur Stephen Hanson and Danny Errico, founder of the fashionable Equinox Fitness Clubs. Its J Bar, where Bond movies are projected on the wall, draws a steady flow of pretty people.

But it just got some competition. In July, the nightclub e4 opened nearby. It features rooms and a patio designed around the four elements – earth, air, fire and water. On a recent Friday night, a throng of 20- and 30-somethings pulsated to house music next to a 20-foot waterfall inside e4′s Liquid Room, while others smoked, sipped cocktails and watched flat-screen TV’s outdoors on the Air Patio.

A few blocks away, men with painstakingly tousled hair and tan women in spaghetti-strapped tops crowded into the bar at Stingray Sushi, a restaurant that hit the scene in December. Cocktails there have names like Godzilla and Lychee Circus, and a fish tank housing – yes – stingrays is built into the floor at the entrance.

And at Sanctuary on Camelback Mountain, a resort and spa north of town, the only seating available at its restaurant, elements – yet another trendy lower-case e name – was at the Community Table. In the middle of the restaurant, it seats 14 and can’t be reserved, intended as it is for diners who want to socialize over orange miso chicken or pecan dusted tilapia.

In all, there are roughly 50 nightclubs, up from about 30 just a few years ago, and more than 600 restaurants, compared to 400 in 1994, according to the Scottsdale Convention & Visitors Bureau. Scottsdale has even started a New Year’s Eve block party. Last year’s attracted an estimated 8,000-plus partyers, the visitors bureau said. Not bad for a town better known for early-bird specials.

“I think it’s one of the best cities on the West Coast to go out partying,” said Hugo Gamboa, 37, a nightclub and restaurant owner from San Francisco in town with Mr. Bernath for the bachelor party. “It’s a mix between Las Vegas and L.A. You get that flavor.”

It wasn’t always that way. Just five years ago, chain restaurants and Southwestern gift shops and galleries dominated downtown and there was little in the way of housing. Then the city came up with a new revitalization plan to spur investment in the area. Soon, new bars, restaurants and boutique hotels were opening – none more notable than the James, where each minimalist-chic room contains a flat-screen TV, martini set and intimacy kit.

The James’s blue and pink facade stands out in garish contrast to the brown and burnt-sienna hues of Scottsdale’s adobe-style downtown. The hotel rooms are situated around its two pools – the Relaxation pool, set in a lush garden, and the Play pool, which with its bar has become so popular it warrants a doorman.

Just inside the entranceway of the Play pool on a recent afternoon, music blasted, mist sprayed from a slatted overhang and men in surfer swimsuits and sunglasses congregated around a pool table, looking as if they were straight out of “Entourage.” Couples lounged on wide white outdoor beds while singles floated and frolicked in the water. From the bar, patrons could watch guests pump iron at the glass-enclosed gym across the way or gaze at bikini-clad sunbathers.

THE night life here is really cool,” said Ilana Fisher, 25, a recent college graduate from Lansing, Mich., as she lounged poolside in a purple bikini in the dry Arizona heat. After visiting Scottsdale for the first time last October, Ms. Fisher decided to move to the area. In Michigan, she said, “there was a lack of anything social other than the movies.”

New projects under way are designed to court young people like Ms. Fisher soon. Construction is nearing completion on the first parts of the new Waterfront development – an 11-acre site along the northern banks of the Arizona Canal in downtown that will offer a mix of residential, retail and office space.

The retro-chic Hotel Valley Ho, built in 1956, and once a playground for celebrities like Clark Gable, Humphrey Bogart and Natalie Wood, is getting a $70 million facelift. It is slated to reopen in December, with 194 rooms and a Trader Vic’s restaurant. Not to be left out, Starwood Hotels & Resorts is planning to open a W Hotel in 2007.

Many young residents welcome the change. “It used to be this dumpy looking kind of town,” said Nikki Faigus, 34, a homemaker from Scottsdale sitting at a table of a dozen women in designer jeans and flashy tops. “Now it’s more fashionable.” The group was celebrating two birthdays with sushi and Asahi beer in the ultrasuede-covered booths at Stingray Sushi.

“I think it’s finally come into its own,” added her friend Alicia Livingston, 36, an investment banker visiting from New York. “I think it’s finally found its identity – fashionable but still down to earth.”

After dining on sushi and teriyaki chicken, the group headed over to e4 a little before 11 o’clock. There, a 100-person line was already starting to snake around the corner. No problem – the women talked their way into the V.I.P. entrance.

Not everyone in conservative Scottsdale is entirely happy about the budding nightlife scene. The Love Bug, a three-year-old erotic boutique, sits among a mix of bars and interior design shops on Craftsman Court, a street that also includes the downtown Visitors Center. Earlier this year, the shop’s owner, Wendy Cashaback, hung T-shirts splashed with obscenities in the window. Not long afterward, the Scottsdale police received complaints from residents and issued a formal request to take them down. Ms. Cashaback moved the offending garments inside, but noted that they were the best-selling items in the store, which stays open late on weekends to attract customers from nearby bars and clubs.

And this is still hardly the Meatpacking District or South Beach. By day, no one’s rollerblading through town in a bikini. Outside of downtown, golf resorts and senior living communities remain the norm. Indeed, the new clubs and restaurants are spread out in pockets – a cluster of nightclubs at the northern end of downtown, a row of bars on Craftsman Court near the Fifth Avenue shopping district, and the James in Old Town. Throughout downtown, restaurant chains and Southwestern-themed shops hawking cowboy boots, turquoise jewelry and jackalopes still dominate.

After dark, on Main Street, old-timers wearing wrangler shirts and cowboy hats dance to country tunes at the Rusty Spur Saloon – a kitschy Western bar that used to be a bank. The bank vault serves as a liquor cabinet and beer cooler. And though there are no fish tanks, waterfalls or drinks with fanciful names, some hipsters prefer it to the trendy spots popping up around town.

“There are not a lot of dive bars in Scottsdale,” said Jason Miller, a 27-year-old financial adviser. “This is the coolest bar in town because it’s real.”

If You Go

Downtown Scottsdale is roughly 20 minutes from the Phoenix airport. Most downtown hotspots are within walking distance of each other, as the entire district is only about two miles long and a mile wide. Still, nearly everyone drives, making parking an issue at peak hours.

Stay at the James Hotel (7353 East Indian School Road, 480-308-1100) for prime people watching and V.I.P. access to its hot J Bar. Flashing a hotel room key will get you and a guest past any doorman. Current rates range from $229 for a standard room to $429 for a suite. In high season (January to April) those same rooms go for $279 to $509.

For something more secluded but still chic, head north to the Sanctuary on Camelback Mountain (5700 East McDonald Drive, Paradise Valley; 480-948-2100) and check into one of its newly remodeled casitas with 42-inch flat-screen TV’s and steel-blue sofas. Rates are $400 to $550.

Both hotels offer trendy restaurants. There’s also Stingray Sushi (4302 North Scottsdale Road, 480-941-4460), which offers both raw and cooked dishes and fancy cocktails.

For dancing, the newest nightclub is e4 (4282 North Drinkwater Boulevard, 480-970-3325). Expect a line as early as 10:30 p.m. on weekends. BS West, which draws a gay crowd, is at the north end of Craftsman Court. Other clubs like Axis/Radius, Suede and Myst, all within blocks of one another south of Camelback Road and east of Scottsdale Road, also draw a young, energetic crowd.

Berkeley, Calif.

WHEN the film version of Steve Martin’s best-selling novella, “Shopgirl,” opens next month, audiences will see just how much of himself Mr. Martin put into the adaptation: he wrote the screenplay, produced the film and stars as Ray Porter, a wealthy older man who enters into a relationship with a shy, depressed clerk (Claire Danes) who spends her days selling gloves at an elegant Beverly Hills department store and her nights making art at her small dining table.

But they will also see the work of the woman who inspired Mr. Martin’s tale in the first place: the artist Allyson Hollingsworth, who created the photographs and drawings attributed to Ms. Danes’s character, Mirabelle Buttersfield, and who also served as a consultant on the film. Ms. Hollingsworth previously worked as an art assistant on “Cheaper by the Dozen,” another of Mr. Martin’s movies, and jumped at this new opportunity, she said, when he offered it. And this time, her own artwork figured into the process: for example, Ms. Hollingsworth recreated one of her original pieces – a charcoal self-portrait of her nude body suspended in dark space – so it could be filmed for the movie as the work progressed.

“To actually be able to be paid to create something while I’m creating it?” said Ms. Hollingsworth, 36, sitting on a chair in her tidy, 9-by-13-foot white-walled studio here, dressed in baggy beige trousers and a pink and white cowboy shirt. “Not that that is a huge motivation for an artist, because that doesn’t happen very often, but to be able to sit there and draw all day? It was such a luxury. My whole life, I had day jobs and fit my art in between. This was absolutely phenomenal.”

At the time, Ms. Hollingsworth had yet to see “Shopgirl,” which was directed by Anand Tucker, but she did catch the two-and-a-half-minute trailer on the Internet. There is a scene where Ms. Danes, wearing a thin cotton gown, sets the timer on her Nikon camera and makes a nighttime dash into a faintly lighted grove of spindly trees. Then a click, and the image is captured. “It got me really excited to see my process reproduced: the car headlights, the freezing of the white figure against the trees,” Ms. Hollingsworth said.

The result is like a giant replica of a series of Ms. Hollingsworth’s ghostly, faux Victorian-era photographs featuring a sleepwalking bride, which appear in a show scheduled to open last night at the Michael Kohn Gallery in Los Angeles. “Oh, it was so cool,” she said of the movie scene.

This is her second one-person show, but the first time she is being featured as just an artist, not also an employee. From 1993 to 1996, she worked at what was then the Kohn-Turner gallery cataloging other people’s art. One day, Mr. Martin, a serious art collector and a regular customer, came by.

“As soon as he left, I looked at Allyson and said, ‘He likes you,’ and she got all red and embarrassed and said, ‘No, he does not,’ ” Michael Kohn, the gallery’s co-owner, recalled recently. “About an hour later there was a phone call, and it was Steve, and he asked to speak to her.” When “Shopgirl” the book was published in 2001, it wasn’t just the “To Allyson” dedication on the flyleaf that suggested who the book’s inspiration had been. “It was the truck that she drove, the cats that lived in her apartment, the apartment that was at the back of the complex,” Mr. Kohn said. “You didn’t have to suspend any disbelief, because he was very truthful to the model.”

And what is Ms. Hollingsworth’s own calculation of the fact-fiction ratio in the book? She replied in a manner that could have been lifted from actions of the self-conscious young woman in “Shopgirl.” First she stammered, then her voice trailed off, then she just fell silent. The flat expression on her face never changed, but discomfort seemed to roil just beneath the surface of her pale skin. The longer she remained silent, the heavier the molecules in the air grew. Finally, she spoke: “I’m a really private person. Even with friends, I have a certain reserve.”

“I think it’s from moving around so much when I was growing up,” said Ms. Hollingsworth, who was born in Columbia, Mo., and as the daughter of a career Army officer attended 12 schools before graduating from high school.

Still, she tried to push beyond her uneasiness and provide a better answer. “There are definitely movies like ‘Erin Brockovich’ or ‘A Beautiful Mind,’ based on a person’s life from Point A to Point B,” she said. “I would certainly say this wasn’t a biography. There were things inspired by experiences that I had, but they’ve been so changed in the process of writing fiction.” Ms. Hollingsworth’s hesitancy extended to any and all queries placing Mr. Martin and herself in a single sentence – including something as simple as how long they were a couple. “I don’t discuss my personal life,” she said. (Mr. Martin declined to be interviewed.)

Perhaps Ms. Hollingsworth would prefer that her art serve as the window into her soul. Having received her undergraduate degree in jewelry and metalsmithing at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, and a master’s degree in art at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, she now lives in Oakland and works in various media – drawing, photography, sculpture, installations – many of them made to look as if they were made at the turn of the 20th century. Even her playful pieces have an underlying sense of longing and sadness.

“For me, it’s about ephemera – her work is a lot about elegy and the question of mortality, what’s fragile,” said Gregory Hinton, a Los Angeles-based novelist who owns a few of Ms. Hollingsworth’s romantic creations, including a quilt made of glistening communion wafers linked together with tiny brass rings, a version of the nude floating in space from “Shopgirl,” as well as an antique handkerchief with the word “once” embroidered in the middle. “It’s like, ‘Once, I loved you,’ or ‘Once I dreamed about this,’ or ‘Once I was here,’ ” said Mr. Hinton. “She works in the past – like a love affair that’s gone.”

Recently, Ms. Hollingsworth reread “Shopgirl” and found it “moving,” she said. “It’s really amazing because the story that he wrote became a kind of universal theme. I think people can identify with love, loss and transforming.”

Correction Appended

Before us lay a bonbon, ensconced on a half shell. We considered the bonbon, debated it, conceptually analyzed the bonbon. We were perplexed, our hard-worn sense of self and confidence plummeting as we tried in vain to decode the elusive yellow powder – clearly a curry of some sort – covering the bonbon.

I was seated with five strangers at an octagonal Moroccan wood table inlaid with geodes and agates for the by-appointment-only Harvey Tasting at the Swanson Vineyards in Rutherford, Calif. We were swaddled in impossibly theatrical décor, surrounded by paintings of vintage peasants. At the table, besides the spiteful bonbon, were six varieties of wine, three types of cheese, a caviar dollop atop crème fraîche atop a potato chip, and four members of the famous Puck family, sans Wolfgang.

“Does anyone experience a tannin?” inquired Shawn Q. Larue, the winery’s salonnier and Perle Mesta. The salon is an ingenious attempt to distinguish Swanson, owned by the TV-dinner family, from tasting rooms for hoi polloi. (Wolfgang’s 23- year-old nephew Lukas correctly identified tannin in the fortified Muscat.)

But deconstructing the particle physics of the bonbon – a heady mix of pink peppercorns, Chinese star anise, clove and cumin over a ganache blended with a $55-a-bottle cabernet and syrah – taxed us to our very marrow. That’s what happens when one is given $1,000 to spend over 24 hours in the monoculture of fabulousness that is Napa.

Of course, surrealism comes with the terroir. My original fantasy had been to stay at the Auberge du Soleil, the lush Mediterranean cloister in Rutherford for haves in seersucker persimmon robes perched on a hill overlooking the valley – specifically, the elite “up valley” north of the city of Napa, where the road gets thin and beautiful and so do the people. But it soon was clear that the Auberge’s lowest midweek rates – $550 for a room above the restaurant or $650 for the cheapest cottage – would stress even my Kate Spade pocketbook.

A friend had told me about the Carneros Inn, a new resort in a less fashionable but up-and-coming part of the valley, straddling Napa and Sonoma. The appeal, besides the summer special of $355 – a sum that my husband, Roger, and I might spend once a year for our anniversary – was an intriguing spa menu that seemed very Napa.

It was thematically divided into “the harvests” (orchard olive stone and honey dew exfoliation), “the cellars” (Bulgarian rose and grape seed), “the minerals” (largely gemstones – ho hum) and the one that sold me, “the farms.” I was instantly captivated by the idea of a warm goat butter massage, which elicited visions of healing angelic goats imparting a chèvre for my soul that would soothe a multitude of woes.

Apparently, I was not the only one with an agricultural fantasy. I checked into the inn amazed to discover a new style of architecture – 4-H Modernism: as if Ma and Pa Kettle had gone to architecture school and became New Urbanists. The rooms, which resembled chic sharecroppers’ cabins outfitted with bottles of Domaine Carneros champagne, were winsome tin-roofed, board-and-batten cottages in haute cracker style, with old-fashioned front porches, rocking chairs and mailboxes for the morning newspaper.

The inn – scaled like a subdivision and still under construction, which the reservations clerk neglected to mention – is managed by the PlumpJack Group, which was founded by Mayor Gavin Newsom of San Francisco, the newly single heartthrob who is now Bachelor No. 1. The 80-foot-long infinity pool was situated idyllically on a hilltop with the restaurant and spa, stretched languorously toward verdant canopies heavy with grapes on the cusp of harvest.

Roger, who drove up separately to meet me for dinner, was already waiting on the porch of our private garden, outfitted with native plants and that pathetic accouterment of foggy Bay area summers, a heat lamp. Our bathroom, I was elated to find, had not only heated floors and a deep marble tub but also two showers: a glass-enclosed one with four gloriously aggressive nozzles, and – my longstanding fantasy – one outdoors, a folksy affair with corrugated metal walls and plank floors. Armed with Italian blood orange body wash, I luxuriated in princess-ness, the warm torrent pounding on tin as I soaked up the perfect Northern California sky, dreaming of barnyard animals.

Anticipating 24 hours of gluttony, I decided it would be a good idea to get some exercise. So, passing the $800-a-day stretch-limo drivers loading up on caffeine at the Oakville Grocery, I had begun my odyssey at the crack of dawn speeding from my home in Oakland to Calistoga for Sip ‘n’ Cycle, a $115-a-person biking tour of wineries operated by Getaway Adventures.

No sooner did I pull into the parking lot than Perry Mayfield, a former bike racer and Kitzbuhel ski instructor, spritzed my face with lavender aromatherapy. “Rejuvenation without caffeine!” he crowed, then proceeded to climb a tree.

Our two wine jocks, Perry and Randy, took us on a Tour de Napa, shunning Highway 29 in favor of quiet, European-feeling back roads. Enshrined in a Plexiglas case at the Chateau Montelena, a widely respected vineyard, was the exalted bottle of 1973 chardonnay that won the famous 1976 Judgment of Paris, in which two California wines outscored the French ones, thus precipitating the cult of Napa.

Feeling flush, I sprang for the exclusive $25 “estate tasting,” including one from a $130-a-bottle ’96 cabernet, which I brought from the somewhat sinister-feeling back room to share among my biking brethren. Later, across a dragon-green lake with swans and pagodas, we spied the balding head of Bo Barrett, Montelena’s esteemed winemaker – a celebrity sighting akin to finding Angelina and Brad eloping in Fiji.

At Zahtila Vineyards, situated on the Silverado Trail, where even the local landfill is Edenic, we learned that everyone in Napa is moving to Ashland, Ore. (50 acres for less than a million, it’s said). The tasting room had a ceramic porcelain spit bucket, a somewhat disgusting ritual Napa objet that is essentially a spittoon for wine snobs. Under the woozy influence of the Montelena cabernet, I bought a 2002 Zahtila cabernet for $50, which was later fetched and delivered by the Getaway Adventures van.

Sporting helmet hair, I visited St. Helena, arguably Napa’s toniest town, which, like its Hamptons soul sisters, is wrestling with its popularity among the riffraff. In recent years, the town has apoplectically tried to block the building of a station for the Wine Train, a “down valley” dining experience on rails that some fear would overrun the town with T-shirted fudge shoppers. Old-fashioned places like Taylor’s Refresher, a frozen-in-time drive-in with static-y loudspeakers, now commune with shops selling white chocolate koi (at $8 each a steal compared with a live koi that recently fetched $170,000 in Japan, a factoid you, too, would know if you read Auberge, the Auberge du Soleil’s glossy magazine).

At the campus store of Greystone, the West Coast outpost of the Culinary Institute of America, I lusted after a $499 set of six fluorescent Laguiole knives designed by the French architect Jean-Michel Wilmotte. But realizing I couldn’t afford dinner or a massage if I bought them, I became absorbed in the collection of 1,800 corkscrews obsessively amassed by the late Brother Timothy, who oversaw the Christian Brothers winery, which formerly occupied the brooding Addams Family-esque building.

The corkscrews, some no bigger than my pinky and vaguely inter-uterine-looking, were divided into bizarre subsets, like Cork Removers That Are Not Corkscrews (itself subdivided into Gas-Powered, Air-Powered and CO2 Powered). They were exhibited as if they were Thebian pre-Dynastic scarabs in the Egyptian wing of the Met – sacred amulets of the good life that is Napa.

Heading back to the inn to meet Roger, I was locked in a death grip of traffic on Highway 29 behind a Volvo with a “Life is a Cabernet” license plate holder. Then, we circled back to the Auberge for a drink and an appetizer ($63 for a shrimp cocktail and two glasses of wine) on the Auberge’s outdoor terrace, enveloped in pleasantness.

The sunset bathed the mountains in blue shadows, and a half moon rose over a huge pyramid housing the Opus One winery. Like Scarlett O’Hara vowing never to go hungry again, I vowed that the next time the gods gave me $1,000 to spend in Napa, I would hole up at the Auberge, even if it meant subsisting on acorns.

We barreled down Zinfandel Lane to Press, the restaurant jointly owned by Dean & DeLuca’s Leslie Rudd that specializes in Napa wines, from 240 wineries. Our waitress, Anne, had a Moonie-like intensity, and the wine list turned out to be a better read than People magazine, with insider tidbits about vintners like Frank Farrell, who still practices law and “burns up the highway between Napa and San Francisco.”

Ordering wine was a memorable experience. “Would you prefer wine from the mountains or the valley floor?” Anne said patiently. “There is more fruit north of Spring Street Mountain Road and more evergreen on Mount Veeder.” (We had a flash of a waitress in New York asking if we would prefer the boiled kosher frank from the Second Avenue Deli or the all-beef grilled one from the Nathan’s Famous at Surf and Stillwell on Coney Island.)

The chef’s “sourcing” page read as if written by William Least Heat Moon. We wanted it all – the Berkshire Heritage Pork from Iowa, the watercress from Sausalito Springs. Roger was presented with a steak knife that looked like Daniel Boone’s. My dish, Skeena River salmon, was not transcendent, but I was too transfixed by the next table to notice, where eight people were drinking six bottles of wine in 24 glasses.

“That’s Robert Foley, thank you!” said the all-knowing Anne, referring to the maker of a “very rustic full-bodied charbono.”

I won’t go into detail about the impossibly decadent Scharffen Berger chocolate soufflé, topper of our $130 dinner, but to say, I regretted it. We went to bed in a stupor. “The floor is at 81 degrees,” Roger muttered.

The monochromatic décor of our cottage felt soothing the next morning. It was finally time to indulge in the spa, where a sign at the front desk said, “Please ask us for complimentary horse cookies.”

The warm goat butter smelled slightly of lavender. The therapist, Arnela Guastucci, put a warm towel under my neck and started to knead my back. I was struck by the sound of the butter, which made sucking, slightly gloppy noises beneath her palms.

I was dimly aware of the rhythm of waves emanating from somewhere. Are the goats swimming? I wondered as I drifted off. Do they have life preservers? When it was over, I went to the rosemary-infused steam room, where my back melted into the tiles. I felt peaceful – basted actually.

I had planned to go to a museum, but bagged it for a swim. I had the sensation of swimming to the grapevines, which loomed on green and russet hills. I thought about the seductive harvest of the senses that is California as I sat in a whirlpool hidden from view, hawks flying overhead, the flicker of Mylar ribbons, to ward off birds, shimmering in the distance. I sank into blissful, buttery oblivion, my soul bleating.

Total spent: $999.85