This Idyllic Retreat with Incredible New York Wines Is the Perfect City Getaway

One of the things you'll hear people talking about in disbelief when you sit at the bar, around the fire pit, or at hearty breakfasts on snowy, cozy mornings at New York’s Wildflower Farms is that you are just a little more than an hour from the George Washington Bridge, that traffic-choked portal to a very different world.

The property is the latest and perhaps greatest of the dizzying number of new hotels and resorts to open in Hudson Valley and the Catskills over the last few change-packed years. 65 country-chic rooms are tucked into spacious, individual cabins with breathtakingly luxurious bathing suites, along 140 idyllic acres.

The resort, managed by California’s Auberge Resorts, is a sybaritic hideout of year-round outdoor hot tubs, fine dining, and a brilliant bar with a banging New York State wine list, cozied up to the geologically unique Shawangunk Ridge. How can all of this be so close to something like New York City and still feel a million miles away? It’s almost unbelievable. 

Not to me. I grew up here, a few years (okay, a lot of years) before Wildflower owners Phillip Rapoport and Kristin Soong Rapoport moved to the little village of Gardiner in Southern Ulster County’s bucolic Wallkill Valley. Back then, this was mostly just apple country, a bump in the road on the way to the rock climbing on the ridge, summertime swims at Minnewaska Lake, and unauthorized romps on property at the majestic Mohonk Mountain House, one of the country’s most sought-after historic hotels.

In those days, we would time our trips to The City — civilization, or so we thought — down to the minute. Just like back then, you can get from the corner of Route 44/55 and Albany Post Road to I-84 in twenty minutes, and then to the New York State Thruway and on to the Palisades Parkway, bringing you to the first sign for the George Washington Bridge ramps in a cool one hour and 15 minutes. There are people who commute on the subway for longer. 

All this time later, an hour and change is how long it took me to get off the so-called grid and back to little, low-key Gardiner, where everything is even prettier than it used to be, if not so obviously glamorous. Those of us who spent a lot of years around here know that things are different these days. We know about Robert De Niro’s massive estate along the Wallkill River and the charming little café, Julian’s, owned by other recent, well-heeled arrivals to the village. We know about the Tuthilltown distillery, makers of one of New York’s best brown liquors, Hudson Rye, produced next door to the old grist mill where we used to go on class trips to see what a water wheel looked like. The distillery has been so successful, it is now owned by Scottish booze conglomerate William Grant & Sons. 

There may still be the odd double-wide, the errant vinyl-sided exurban manse, and ramshackle bungalow holding out on the inevitable, but while Gardiner has not moved any farther away from the city physically, it has lately started to feel, as so many other of the meet-cute villages in the region, like some sort of eastern Sonoma Valley. It’s filled with vineyards and fruit-growing and artisanal making of things. There are city people with money not flashing their money around. The winters, however, will still have you on your knees, beseeching the heavens for a morning above 40 degrees.

If you are unfamiliar with the territory, you might drive right past Wildflower Farms and never even know it was there. Pulling into the unpaved driveway, you will only see farm fields, greenhouses, and maybe a wheelbarrow, or a shovel standing sentry in the glue-like ground.

To me, all this looks like home, like the farm (still there!) just a few miles up the Wallkill I worked most summers in the 1980s. Wildflower is all about the understated entrance, the long, slow reveal. Just as Gardiner is not one to show off, neither is the hotel apparently, but then, just as the sun disappeared behind the ridge and dusk began to settle in on one of the coldest nights of the year, I found the promise of a warmly lit, swooping porte cochere, tying right into the wide-open (and very heated) outdoor living room with one of the largest fire pits you’ll ever see, facing out to that same sunset view. 

Suddenly, it’s all right in front of you, every gloriously, shamelessly West Coast-driven detail, right down to the cleansing ceremony to which I was invited at the very deep, very modern farmhouse sink installed directly next to the front desk, sitting inside an impossibly charming concept shop selling the sort of artisanal bric-a-brac with a backstory favored by new California money. 

There I was, a few miles from my ancestral home, and a young man who also grew up a couple of towns over (which I know because I had to ask) began spooning sea salt crystals into my hands, inviting me to exfoliate as he pumped a dollop of dusky, very expensive rose and sandalwood body wash made on a small island in British Columbia. Running a cascade of perfect-temperature warm water, he urged me to leave all my various troubles and cares behind. It’s happened, I’m thinking. The Californians are here. They’re going to flip the Hudson Valley and sell it back to us for a profit. 

The whole thing might be funny, or even annoying, if it wasn’t so bewitching. After a long day in the real world, I want to climb into the sink and have a good soak. (Luckily, the ridiculously deep tub and oversized rainforest shower in my room do the job during my two-night stay.) And while the bottle of fresh rosemary-infused lemonade handed to me might have been more appreciated on a summer's day, it was all so charming, so unnecessary, and yet so welcomed. You certainly don’t get that sense of arrival up the hill at Mohonk, which, for all its scenery and history and breathtaking bill at the end of your stay, is about as luxurious as your average national park lodge. 

Then again, when you call in a brand like Auberge, you are telling people that you mean business. The Bay Area-based luxury hotel management company is behind some of the finest lodgings in the Napa Valley, as well as a fast-growing string of exclusive hideouts around the world favored by weary celebrities and the people with enough money to vacation with them. 

I’ve stayed at Auberge du Soleil, more than once, and as a nearly lifelong New Yorker, I have always appreciated its sunny, inclusive approach to luxury. While now sort of an elder statesman by California rules, the hotel still has this relatively youthful, casual vibe, all while hewing to typically high standards. The combination is very effective, commanding rates starting in the low four figures per night, and that’s typically without breakfast, let alone anything else. Could such an experience be reproduced on the banks of the mostly muddy, soon to be frozen Wallkill, a hairsbreadth removed from New York City’s exurban sprawl? And would New Yorkers pay for such an experience? 

On a bone-chilling Monday night in November, the front desk revealed that the property was sold out, a fact made quite believable as I entered the hotel restaurant, Clay — a tribute to the soil where much of the restaurant’s produce is already grown, which inspires chef Rob Lawson’s thoughtful, modern cooking — only to find the room packed with people, both the bar and at the tables, a row of which sit right against the kitchen, where I can see the chef hard at work. 

The worldly wine list, tightly curated by Empire State-positive sommelier and author Vanessa Price, features an extensive selection of New Yorks by the bottle and glass, and with my head already spinning from trying to make sense of my experience so far, I dipped into a throaty Finger Lakes Cabernet Franc from Hermann J. Wiemer, looking out to the slowly disappearing silhouette of the backlit ridge. Everything was just as perfect as you could hope it to be nowadays, and certainly on a Monday in November.

I thought a lot about how even in the tradition-bound Hudson Valley, some change is not only good, but it is long overdue, and why, precisely, did I ever leave this beautiful place? Also, I noticed while looking down, I’ve already got mud on my shoes. The surroundings might have taken a minute to get used to, but I was definitely, unmistakably home.