Menu
Menu
Tina and Brett
The California Wine Festival takes place in two parts: an evening reception dubbed the Sunset Rare & Reserve Wine Tasting and the Beachside Wine Festival. We attended the Huntington Beach event, but the event makes stops all along the California coast. The current host cities include Dana Point, Carlsbad, Santa Barbara, and, of course, Huntington Beach.
If you’re a wine lover who already has a sense of the style of wine, you like and the grape varieties you like, and are familiar with the industry’s most respected winemakers, then the festival’s Sunset Rare & Reserve Wine Tasting is a must. This event is limited to about 300 guests, and the wines poured include bottles no longer on the market or limited-run vintages.
This pre-festival reception is held the evening prior to the Beachside tasting and features producers like Miner Family Wines and Michael Mondavi Family Wines, as well as up-and-coming wineries like Hibou, a boutique producer in Sonoma County and Silva Road Wines from the Redwood Valley AVA.
Knowing that the Huntington Beach stop of the California Wine Festival would be held at the Pasea Hotel & Spa, we opted to stay at the hotel to make things easy and purchased VIP passes to the rare wine-tasting reception, which was held the night before the general admission festival. If you’re considering a visit to Huntington Beach, you might find our review of the Pasea Hotel helpful.
If you attend this event, consider purchasing VIP tasting passes that allow you to move to the front of the line to check-in. This expedited entry makes things very easy, and we recommend you spring for this “fast pass” entry because the sooner you check-in, the sooner you pick up your welcome glass of Champagne, and the sooner you can start tasting!
Once we had our gifted wine glass in hand, we entered the ballroom and started exploring the evening’s offerings – and we weren’t the only ones; the ballroom filled up very quickly. In an effort to conserve space and ensure all of the winemaker tables had adequate room to set-up their tastings, the organizers had just a handful of four-person round tables if you wanted to sit and relax for a moment. Otherwise, this popular event was standing-room only.
One thing we loved about this lower-key, high-level offering was the top-shelf wines and the intimate approach of the event. The guests at the reception were all seasoned wine lovers, and they appreciated the ability to speak directly to the winemaker and learn about the wine in greater depth.
The reception also had four food stations with chef-prepared nibbles – a nice touch to accompany the wines.
On the wine side, our favorites of the night were: Barlow Vineyards, a multi-generation winemaking family from Calistoga, and the aforementioned Hibou Wines, Bellante Family Wines, and Michael Mondovi (ANIMO).
We love wine festivals, especially when we discover new producers and can talk wine with the guys and gals who make it. But here’s the thing about Saturday’s event: it was just way too crowded.
The California Wine Festival in Huntington Beach pulled in a record number of people – somewhere around 1,800 were in attendance. It’s great that the wine community is booming, but it’s not great when vendors run out of wine, which is what happened between 2:30 pm and 3 pm. But it wasn’t just the wine booths in the general admission area; even the VIP event ran out of wine. A wine festival kind of loses its luster if there is no wine to sample.
The bright spot of the Beachside event on Saturday was the food. Not only did the festival have your usual artisan purveyors with local cheeses, bakery-style breads, cold shellfish, and chocolates, but they really went out of their way to amplify unique mom-and-pop vendors with restaurant-worthy food. There was Traeger-cooked Texas tri-tip, crispy rice spicy tuna, Mahogany Smoked Meats charcuterie boards, handheld chicken pot pies, California smash burger sliders, and sweet gingered cashew brittles.
Despite some vendors running out of vino, everyone seemed to enjoy the day sampling wines under the California sun.
Final Thoughts
If you’re interested in attending the California Wine Festival in Carlsbad, Dana Point, Santa Barbara, or Huntington, and you want to get the most out of the experience, you’re going to have a much better time at the Sunset Rare & Reserve Wine Tasting held the evening before the beachside event.
To put it another way, ask yourself if you would prefer to socialize with 300 people or the 1800+ that attend on Saturday.
Lastly, the event could use just a little (or a lot) more seating so guests can sit back and relax in between sips.
