What do you do if you are relaxing with great friends and sipping wine in their beautiful tasting room in Napa Valley? If you are Thomas Arvid, you capture the moment with a masterpiece of oil on canvas. While showcasing the portfolio of Salvestrin wines in exquisite detail, Arvid affords us a surreptitious vista into the tasting room itself. Caught in the reflections of the bottles, we have a peek into the setting of the painting and find ourselves caught up in the architecture of the room, forgetting until we pull back that we are actually gazing at the surface of the bottle.
Arvid often finds himself on “Napa Time,” and considers Napa his home away from home. Over the course of the last 25 years, he has developed friendships in the valley and formed such close relationships that they consider each other family. Not surprising given the parallels between the culture in Napa and the cultures in Maui and Georgia, his two other “homes.” All three are set in a foundation of community, hospitality, and authenticity: aloha at its finest.