The Calendar
Two hundred American wine events across all fifty states, sorted by date, each one carrying a confidence rating. The trade conferences are fixed years out. The festivals are considerably less sure of themselves.
Most wine calendars online are last year’s calendar with the year changed. These are the six entries where that quietly fails.
After twenty-five years, the organisers said out loud what several of their peers are thinking: the model of larger gatherings is not the preferred format of the emerging wine consumer. A 2027 revival is being explored, alongside satellite pop-up tastings.
Paused for 2026 while Sonoma County Vintners explore opportunities to evolve the event. Donations are being routed straight to the foundation in the meantime.
It is now F.L.X. Summer Fest at The Glen, rebranded in January 2025. The old name is gone from Watkins Glen International’s own calendar, which has not stopped most listings sites from printing it.
The San Francisco winter format is finished. It moves to Healdsburg for 29–30 January 2027 under new leadership, with a June grand tasting at Fort Mason absorbing part of what it was.
Attendance held under 2,000 for its thirty-fifth year. A well-known festival choosing to get smaller is worth more than a minute of your attention.
Respectable, and roughly half the $6M-plus it was clearing in the 2010s. This is the clearest public read on the Napa collector market, and it is worth tracking every year.
Two pauses, a rebrand, a relocation and a deliberate downsize inside twelve months is not a run of bad luck. The large-format grand tasting is contracting while small, high-touch and trade-only formats hold.
The events where the trade watches the result.
01 Every date is read from the organiser’s own site or a named publication.
02 Anything that cannot be pinned to a primary source is flagged as unconfirmed, not printed as fact.
03 Aggregator event sites contradict each other constantly. None of them is a source here.
04 Attendance figures come from the organiser or carry an estimate marker. Most festivals do not publish them at all.
The full calendar goes up here as the autumn confirmations land. September to November is when most organisers publish next year’s dates — usually four to eight weeks after the current edition closes.
What is worth the flight, what is worth the ticket, and what has quietly stopped being either.
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