Full Belly Files: SoCal to Napa and Back: My Eight-Hour Jet Junket

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A few Tuesdays ago, I woke up in Hollywood, spent six hours in the Napa Valley, and was back home in Santa Barbara by 9 p.m. There was no genie involved, but such state-spanning travel did require a magic carpet of sorts: the Gulfstream 500, which is the newest addition to Flexjet’s fleet of 340 airplanes.  

Flexjet is one of the leading fractional aircraft ownership companies, through which contracted clients can book private plane trips to almost anywhere with very little advanced notice. 

The concept exploded during COVID, when wealthy people who’d never flown private realized that they could and never looked back. This timeshare-like model is now a nearly $50 billion industry.

The competitive allure of Flexjet is its focus on the luxury experience, whose visionary chairman Kenn Ricci is spoken of in a near-reverential way by his employees. He spearheaded training cabin stewards to European standards at the company’s Red Label Academy near London and collaborated with travel experts to customize client trips to places like Machu Picchu, Marrakech, and Lake Como. One such partner is Porthos, a Napa Valley–based concierge service that opens doors to wineries in California and Europe that are not otherwise open to the public. 

Hence the email that showed up in my inbox a few weeks before, asking if I’d like to fly on a private jet to Napa and check out top-tier estates for the day. Like many journalists and influencers in the food/wine/travel space, I get lots of invites for lots of awesome experiences all the time, but I almost always decline. I’m usually too busy, or the subject matter is not really what I cover or, more to the point, it’s not relevant to the publications that publish my work.

But I triple-taked on this invite. That exact day was wide open (a rarity); despite being a California wine writer, I somehow never make it to Napa because it’s too far away (problem solved); and, well, flying on private planes is quite a treat. I know as much because my rich and famous great uncle owned a Challenger that my family flew on occasionally until he died in 2007, and I’ve since flown a few times on other private or semi-private planes of varying sizes for various reasons. 

So “this isn’t my first rodeo” is pretty much how I introduced myself to Matt the pilot and Francesco Valerio, Flextjet’s chief steward who’s in charge of that London academy. I met them, the other willing journalists, and a few excited Flexjet reps (they rarely fly on company jets) at the Van Nuys airport. That is where, it’s worth mentioning, I once flew solo on Sylvester Stallone’s jet with my own stewardess right after Eddie Murphy had done the same. (I also humble-dropped that story within about seven minutes of arrival, and am happy to provide further details upon request.)  

Matt was downright giddy to explain what makes the Gulfstream 500 so badass: faster than other similarly sized jets, flies higher (so above bad weather), cutting edge cockpit features, opalescent, large, and tintable windows, passenger cabin controls via app, and so on. He was also proud that the forward-thinking Flexjet runs its own maintenance division, as getting private planes worked on now takes many months due to backlog at the diminishing number of MROs, which stands for “maintenance, repair, overhaul.” 

We also talked briefly about the Otto Phantom, the 60-percent-more fuel efficient and windowless (!) jet that Flexjet plans to buy when it’s finally built, maybe in a year or so. Efficiency is a major knock on PJs, as they burn way more fuel-per-person than commercial airlines, making them carbon emission bad boys. A primary reason is because these jets — ours could fit 19 passengers at super-full capacity — often only have one or two people on them. (We had 14 people total, including the pilots and steward.)  

Safety and ease of travel is also top-of-strategy. Flexjet runs its own meteorology department, and the Cleveland-based company’s control room features so many screens that only NASA has more, or so I was told.

And the fractional jet model’s track record was almost entirely spotless until, in an oddly ominous-in-retrospect coincidence, the first-ever fatal crash of such a plane happened on the same night of our trip. As I only learned while writing this two weeks later, a NetJets plane coming back from Cabo crash-landed on a highway in Laredo, Texas, killing an Austin tech entrepreneur while five others and a dog survived.   

I’m generally in the buy (or be given)-the-ticket, take-the-ride camp, so I sauntered onto the plane and — at the suggestion of another writer, I swear — took what they call the “principal” seat: the first front-facing seat on the right side, within view of the cockpit and considered the command center of the cabin. 

“Everyone thank Matt for paying!” announced Francesco upon seeing my choice, to which I replied, “Do you take Venmo?” People laughed. 

Minutes later, we were leaping off of the ground at a steep pitch and remarkable speed, revealing just how agile the Gulfstream could be. Out came the cuisine, first a modest but pretty yogurt with granola and fresh fruit, and then rounds of sandwiches: roast beef and cheddar, lox and cream cheese, ham and swiss — wait, aren’t we going straight to lunch once we land?

After flying briefly up the Sonoma Valley and then back down Napa’s — wine grape monoculture on full display — we pulled into The Charter Oak in St. Helena, where we were joined by Porthos founder Hal Oates near the raging hearth. As he explained the origins and operations of his company, which reviews about 1,000 wines per year to consult for high-end collectors, we sipped on Quintessa’s Illumination sauv blanc and Hanzell’s Sebella pinot noir while enjoying fresh garden veggies (banana pepper in fermented soy dip for the wine!), butter-lubed rice, and expertly charred meats and mushrooms.

Our first estate was Eisele Vineyard, where grape-growing dates back 150 years but picked up modern speed in the 1970s, originally introduced as a Ridge bottling in 1971 and then shepherded by Joseph Phelps until 1991. 

That’s when the Araujo family took over, built the winery, and replanted much of the vineyard, going organic in 1998 and biodynamic two years later. In 2013, French billionaire François Pinault — owner of Château Latour, but you may also have heard of Gucci, Balenciaga, Christie’s, and CAA — made the Araujos an offer they couldn’t refuse (their words, not mine!), and it’s become one of his family’s most beloved projects ever since. 

We tasted wine in their actual home, where the walls are covered in original artworks whose striking features are probably only eclipsed by their worth. There was rare champagne, sauv blanc, syrah, and a Bordelaise blend called Altagracia, which turned out to be a steal for $180. 

Being Napa, the star of the show was the estate cab. I’ve tasted a decent amount of high-priced, 100-point Napa cabs in recent years, and find many of them to be overly tannic, overly ripe, or otherwise based on palate-pinching power rather than balanced elegance. But the Eisele cab —as well as the cabs at Dana Estates, where we went next — was a lesson in restraint and finesse, revealing to me how Napa can be nuanced and rather stunning.   

Of course, the Eisele cab sells for $675 upon release, a price that will shock all but the top collectors on the planet. The reds at Dana — which is an architectural and historical gem, brought back to life by South Korean wine import Hi Sang Lee over the past two decades — are similarly priced. 

But it was Dana’s Hershey Vineyard sauv blanc from Howell Mountain that really hammered home the outrageous pricing of Napa today. We were still touring the caves when it reached my glass, and I was immediately entranced by distinctive wafts of chamomile and lemon bar, backed up by a tense grip on the sip

“How much does this go for?” I asked. 

“Five-seventy five” came the reply. 

“In dollars?!?” I asked, realizing that I’d probably just tasted one of the most expensive white wines on the planet. 

But I was informed that the price was quite a deal, at least compared to Screaming Eagle’s white. That one fetches close to $1,500 on release and then around double that on resale, if you can find it. 

If the goal of this jet junket was to blow our minds with luxury that’s unattainable for 99.9 percent of humans, they kicked it through the back of the net. And that makes perfect sense, given that the entry level target client for Flexjet is someone with at least $25 million in liquid wealth. 

Legitimate carbon emission and global wealth disparity concerns aside, flying like this seems impossible to beat. And the fractional formula feels more appealing than even owning your own jet. 

“It gives you the feeling of owning your own jet without the headache of owning your own jet,” explained Sara Hirsch, the company’s VP of sales. And Flexjet caters to every client’s every trip — maintaining a profile of preferences for every owner, adding bells and whistles when appropriate. “Your trip to Disneyland begins the moment you get on board,” said Hirsch as one example. “We will do whatever you want.”

On the flight home, we sipped on Laurent-Perrier cuvée rosé while watching a live World Cup match in midair. In-flight dinner was hamburgers — quite tasty, though we had to make them ourselves, like peasants. I made sure to confirm visually that the toilet did indeed have a bidet, and peeked into the cockpit, where the pilots smiled from ear-to-ear about all the technology at their disposal. 

Upon landing, I snagged a couple of Erewhon juices from the Flextjet lobby fridge, accepted a gift bag with two wines from the day’s visits — no, not the $600 ones — and said my goodbyes. Minutes later, I was in my dirty old truck, turning onto 101, and headed back to reality.