A Scandalous Vintage : WINE COUNTRY; A History of Napa Valley, The Early Years: 1838-1920 <i> By William F. Heintz (Capra Press: $29.95; 310 pp., illustrated)</i> : NAPA <i> By James Conaway (Houghton Mifflin: $24.95; 506 pp., illustrated) </i>

If two new books on the Napa Valley were wines, you’d sip one slowly and gulp the other. William F. Heintz’s history of the region from 1838 to 1920, which is to be followed by a second volume, would be a cabernet in the traditional style, heavy and full-bodied. I wouldn’t order a case, however, because even a scholarly work such as “Wine Country” needs more color and flair.

James Conaway’s “Napa” resembles a sparkling wine. It’s bright, brassy and slips right down but reads more like a gossipy novel than a journalistic account of events. While both books include photographs, Conaway’s should have a fold-out map showing where the bodies are buried.

Heintz is a former corporate historian who’d done prodigious amounts of research. “Wine Country” traces the origin of viticulture in the Napa Valley to 1838, when George Yount, the first white settler, planted a small vineyard. The grapes were intended for eating. Young and like-minded pioneers, most of them Midwestern farmers, came from religious/fundamentalist backgrounds and believed that grapes “were to be eaten for food and not, God forbid, for the making of wine.” They changed their minds when the Gold Rush of 1849 brought hordes of thirsty miners to California, clamoring for something alcoholic to cut the dust.

The settlers displaced the native Wappo Indians, of whom the “Nappas” were a small band, and in two decades, killed off almost all of them. Cholera and smallpox finished what rifles began. Heintz notes that before their people were completely decimated, Indian laborers in George Yount’s employ may have planted the first of the grapevines destined to cover the land.

During the Gold Rush, the Valley’s population swelled, creating a huge demand for food. The region became a county and agriculture replaced cattle raising as its chief industry. Traces of a wilder West remained, though. When a cannon exploded during a Fourth of July celebration, according to an 1854 account, “blowing off the arm of one man and destroying the sight of another,” the event merely “dampened temporarily the pleasure of the afternoon.”

Heintz credits Simpson Thompson from Bucks County, Pa., a nursery owner, with introducing the system of cultivating fruit without irrigation. Anton Haraszthy, John Osborne and Charles Krug, names better known to future generations, experimented with varieties of grapes and with wine-making techniques.

By the late 1850s, a publication called “The California Farmer” vigorously promoted “The Commerce of the Vine, Olive and Mediterranean Fruits,” the importation of which, into the eastern United States, offered a lucrative market. Napa and nearby Sonoma counties caught “wine fever,” consigning acreage to grapes at such a pace that the number of vines planted jumped from 22,000 to 55,000 in one year. The wine “could not have been of very high quality,” Heintz writes discreetly, but at least there was lots of it.

“We are to make wine as common an article of consumption in America as upon the Rhine,” one booster wrote in 1864, but even with a respectable product, thanks to the planting of European root stock, vintners had a rough row to hoe. Eastern snobs insisted that only French wines were fit to drink, a prejudice that proved dismayingly durable.

Working from an impressive range of source materials, Heintz charts the Napa Valley’s evolution into a prestigious wine-growing region. It’s a solidly capable job, but italics and exclamation points pepper every page, and the over-emphasis grates: “Cooper fails to mention if Yount served any wine at dinner!” “McIntyre . . . seems to have become the first winery architect in the entire United States!” Enthusiasm is a fine thing. One still wants to tell Heintz “Calm down!”

“Wine Country” also could use pruning, the cutting away of extraneous details and digressions. But it’s a valuable contribution to California history.

In “Napa,” James Conaway sets out not just to inform but to entertain. The one-time wine columnist for the Washington Post succeeds on both counts. He writes well, understands the region’s politics and social structure, and has a novelist’s eye. If “Falcon Crest” hadn’t gotten there first, he’d have the makings of a TV series in which Joan Collins could play any number of roles.

Betty Naylor, for example. Wife of John Daniel, who inherited Inglenook, Naylor humiliated her husband with a series of love affairs and terrorized her children. Conaway describes her hitting one young daughter so hard on the back of the neck, at a dinner party, that the child fell unconscious into the soup. Whereupon her mother stormed out, presumably yelling “No wire hangers!”

Helene de Pins, daughter of the founder of Beaulieu Vineyards, was another tyrant and a penny-pincher. Too cheap to invest money in the business after her father died, although she had plenty, she sold the prestigious estate, famous for its premium wines. The new owner was Heublein Corp., producer of “an ocean of pop wine, not just Cold Duck and the standby sweeties but also Bali Hai, Zapple (made of apples) and a cola-flavored creation called I Love You.”

Albeit in drag, Collins even could play Ernest Gallo, whom Conaway describes as ruthless. “Remember,” Gallo instructs a young sales manager, “people aren’t led--they’re driven!”

And we’ve only begun to dish. Gleefully recounting the rift between the brothers Peter and Robert Mondavi, which ended up in a lawsuit, Conaway describes a fight between Robert and his mother Rosa, in the matriarch’s kitchen, and all but accuses Robert of killing her:

The two argue in Italian, in the presence of an old friend who can’t understand what they’re saying. “Finally Robert said something that made Rosa fall off her chair. Her friend rushed forward to help her while Robert stood staring down at his mother as if at a stranger. . . .

“After Robert was gone, Rosa said ‘I have two sons. One has short legs and he is a saint. One has longer legs and he is a devil.’

“She died shortly thereafter.”

A group of wine makers who call themselves the GONADS, short for the “Gastronomic Order of the Nonsensical and Dissipatory,” hold their monthly orgy of gorging, drinking their brains out and telling coarse jokes. These gents greet one another with “How’re they hanging?”

Another wine maker, Joe Heitz, has little use for wine tastings, considering them a waste of time. “But after someone asked him for his autograph, Heitz was seen more often in the midst of swirling, sniffing devotees of the ultimate beverage.”

Some real-life characters come off well. Others are greedy parvenus, whose pretensions Conaway exposes in long, “re-created” conversations, as if he’d been a fly on the wall. The hybrid of history and fictional techniques raises credibility problems; I’ll believe some of these conversations only when I hear the tapes.

That said, there’s no resisting “Napa,” and along with shaking up the Valley--bookstores can’t keep this one in stock--Conaway makes a serious point. If Napa Valley can’t be saved from developers, who are steadily gaining political clout, no place can.