North Coast Wine & Food Festival

The North Coast Wine & Food Festival is a single June afternoon at the Luther Burbank Center for the Arts in Santa Rosa with one simple rule: every wine poured has won gold. The bottles come from The Press Democrat's North Coast Wine Challenge, which judges wines from Sonoma, Napa, Mendocino, Lake, Marin and Solano counties.

Local chefs set up food stations between the pours, live music keeps the afternoon moving, and the tasting spreads outdoors across the center's grounds.

It is a shortcut to the whole North Coast. Instead of driving valley to valley, you can taste around a hundred medal winners in an afternoon, set a Russian River Pinot beside a Mendocino sparkler, and leave with a short list of wineries to visit next.

The judging happens before you arrive, so every glass is a contender and the pressure is off. Graze, compare, linger on the lawn: it plays more like a friendly survey course than a scramble.