NOVEMBER 2003 The late-autumn air is as crisp and tart as the ripened apples hanging in the orchards draped across the hilly eastern shoulder of the Hudson River Valley. Like the air and the apples, the landscape is almost perfect. Viewed from the ribbon-like Kingston-Rhinecliff bridge, it looks as though it could have materialized from one of Frederic Church's 19th-century canvases. The sudden apparition of one of Frederick Vanderbilt's yachts, headed for Manhattan from his country house in Hyde Park, wouldn't be any more surprising than the appearance of a troop of Continentals. The river, discovered by Verrazano and explored by Henry Hudson, was America's first superhighway. It helped mold the national character and holds much of our history, from the landmark battle at Saratoga (won by the heroics of Benedict Arnold) that turned the course of the American Revolution to the fortress at West Point (that Amold later betrayed), and down to the countercultural fest at Woodstock. The Algonquins called it "muhheakantuk" - the river that flows both ways. And so it does, with pure Adirondack water running down toward the ocean and the ocean pushing back, causing a fluctuating tide as far upriver as Troy, north of Albany. It's a nice image, this give and take between the valley and the megalopolis on the ocean, and lots of other things run both ways as well. Urbanites needing a break from city life trickle upstream and every year a few more of them stay to operate restaurants, inns, art galleries, farms and wineries. The valley sends back prized produce; many of the city's finest restaurants rely on Hudson Valley vegetables. Aspiring chefs migrate upstream as well, coming to train at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park. In time, most of them return to run kitchens in the city, but a number have remained to open bistros here. Small, intimate dining rooms abound, and it's hard to imagine another rural area that can match the quality of the valley's cuisine. This was where the gentry of the Gilded Age came to escape the workaday confinement of Wall Street. Their mansions still cap the heights, jaunty white berets atop the rolling hills. Many are now museums, open for touring, while others, such as John Jacob Astor's stunning Belvedere, have been refit as dining rooms or bed-and-breakfasts. Urbane, but hardly urban, the sophisticated folds of the valley have preserved a style of life that values authenticity and which has cultivated a bewitching mosaic of intimate inns and eateries, stitched together with vineyards, art galleries and antiques markets. Stretching north of New York City past Albany, for most of its length the Hudson is technically not a river. It's an estuary, its rim polished and sculpted by an overachieving sheet of ice about 10,000 years ago. When the ice headed back to Canada, water from the Atlantic Ocean poured in, eventually meeting up with fresh water coming down from Lake Tear of the Clouds north of Albany. The steep walls of the valley channel more than water, too. They funnel temperate air from the ocean inland, moderating the climate and creating ideal conditions for apples and mustard greens and, especially, grapes. Nearly forgotten in the first flush of enthusiasm for American wines, the Hudson Valley is reclaiming its reputation as the birthplace of American wine making. While it has been called the Napa of the East, it might be more accurate to call Napa the Hudson of the West. The two share an abundance of vineyards - only those in the Hudson have a much longer heritage. French Huguenots brought the first European grape varietals to the valley in the 17th century. They found that the combination of limestone-based soil, long summers and cool nights suited their grapes well, but they struggled with phylloxera, the pest that later devastated European vineyards. The French grafted European vines onto hardy American rootstocks to create the familiar modern phylloxera-resistant hybrids, and these eventually made their way back to the Hudson Valley. Today, there are dozens of wineries in the valley, many devoted to producing small case lots of familiar varietals - Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, Riesling - though they also make award-winning wines from less famous grapes, like the. Marechel Foch, Chancellor and Seyval Blanc. In addition to providing the resistant rootstock that revitalized European vineyards, the Hudson Valley was also the model for American farm wineries. Unlike commercial wineries, which often make wine from grapes purchased from a variety of growers, farm wineries work only with grapes grown in their own vineyards. Visitors can make their way up the valley from vineyard to vineyard, observing every step in the process from crushing to bottling and tasting how each winery makes its vintages unique. Along the way, two wine trails - Dutchess on the east bank and I Shawangunk on the west - entice visitors. There's much more to the valley than eating very well, drinking even better and sleeping at historic inns. sleeping at historic inns. The Hudson River school of painters - Church, Alfred Bierstadt, Thomas Cole - romanticized the valley and its environs, and their impact on American art and the American consciousness about the value of the wilderness was enormous. Bierstadt applied his dreamlike technique elsewhere, too, and his canvases of Yosemite and Yellowstone provided a seminal impulse for theirprotection by Congress in the 1860s. Later generations of painters have found the valley just as inspiring. All along the banks, small galleries devoted to living artists provide a counterpoint to treasures like the collections at DIA in Beacon - whose 300,000 square feet of exhibit space allow it to show all 102 pieces comprising Andy Warhol's 1978 work Shadows - and the Loeb Art Center at Vassar College. The largest sculpture park in the United States, Storm King, covers most of a square mile in e Mountainville. Its manicured grounds house masterworks by David Smith, Isamu Noguch_ and Alexander Calder. From New Paltz, with its avenue of original 17th-century Huguenot houses, to the chic streets of Rhinebeck, lined with trendy galleries and just-so cafes, there's something in the valley to rejuvenate even the most jaded urbanite.

Copyright 2003 Saveur Magazine