Healdsburg Wine & Food Experience

The Healdsburg Wine & Food Experience is a four-day May festival that turns Healdsburg into a stage for wine and cooking. Its centerpiece is the Saturday Grand Tasting on Vintners Plaza, where producers from Sonoma and around the world pour alongside visiting chefs. Around it run seminars, winemaker dinners and estate events: a garden-to-table lunch at Kendall-Jackson, an outdoor concert at Rodney Strong, a chef's dinner at Aperture Cellars and a VIP lunch at Ferrari-Carano. The program changes with each edition, so the schedule is worth reading closely.

Go for the range. In a single weekend you can taste Sonoma producers next to bottles from far beyond California, spend an afternoon in an estate garden or at a vineyard concert, and still walk to dinner off the Plaza. Healdsburg is small enough that the festival feels like the town itself rather than a convention hall, and the estate events show the north county's grand properties in spring.