Spring

Pour + Explore is Sonoma County Vintners' traveling tasting series. Each evening lands at a different host winery and gathers more than twenty-five Sonoma County producers around a single theme, a grape, a style or a group of appellations, for a walk-around tasting with light appetizers. The series is produced with sommelier Christopher Sawyer. Keller Estate hosts an evening devoted to the Petaluma Gap and the West Sonoma Coast, and Gloria Ferrer has closed recent seasons with a night of sparkling wine.

Sonoma Sips is a winter tasting month in Sonoma Valley, run by the Sonoma Valley Visitors Bureau with Sonoma Valley Vintners & Growers. From mid-February to mid-March, more than fifty wineries, tasting rooms, restaurants and hotels offer a special tasting for a flat fifteen dollars. There is no pass to buy: you choose a stop, tell your host you are there for Sonoma Sips, and they pour the offer. Recent participants include Larson Family, Cline, Imagery, B.R. Cohn and St. Francis.

For one week each late winter, restaurants across Sonoma County, from Petaluma to Healdsburg, set special menus at fixed prices. Three-course dinners come in at $30, $40 or $60, with one-course breakfasts and lunches, shared menus for four, and $6 Sweet Perks for dessert.

The county's Economic Development Collaborative runs the week, and more than 80 restaurants take part, from bakeries to fine-dining rooms.

Barrel Tasting is Wine Road's March weekend in the cellar. Dozens of wineries across Alexander Valley, Dry Creek Valley and the Russian River draw young wine straight from the barrel with a wine thief, and many offer it as futures: you order now and collect the finished bottles once they are released. Alongside the barrel samples, wineries pour current releases, and some open library wines, so a single stop can show the past, present and future of one cellar. It is the north county's great cellar weekend.

The Sonoma International Film Festival takes over the town of Sonoma for several days each March, with screenings at the historic Sebastiani Theatre on the Plaza and at venues around it. The program runs to around a hundred films: independent features, documentaries, world cinema and shorts, with a sidebar devoted to food, wine and culinary film.

Between screenings the festival keeps its other promise, film with food and wine, through receptions, parties and wine and culinary events across town.

Chef Charlie Palmer's cult two-day blowout has a new home, Appellation Healdsburg, his just-opened flagship resort. The format holds: Friday's Taste of Pigs & Pinot turns sixty hand-picked Pinots loose in the blind-judged Pinot Cup, with pork in every conceivable form from Palmer and a bench of Sonoma kitchens including The Matheson and Diavola. This year's twists: an all-father-and-son chef lineup and the event's first all-female Gala winemaker roster, with Sonoma names like Blue Farm and Merry Edwards pouring. Proceeds fund the Palmer Family Education Foundation; tickets are gold dust.

For three days each spring, California's artisan cheese world gathers in Sonoma County. Farm and producer tours head out to dairies and creameries, seminars and pairing workshops fill the middle of the weekend, and a Cheese Crawl winds through the makers and shops of The Barlow in Sebastopol.

It all builds to the Artisan Cheese Tasting & Marketplace at the Sonoma County Fairgrounds in Santa Rosa, where more than a hundred cheesemakers, winemakers, brewers and food artisans sample and sell. The California Artisan Cheese Guild produces the festival.

TASTE Alexander Valley is the Alexander Valley Winegrowers' April invitation: for the whole month, participating wineries pour a complimentary tasting, many without an appointment, and many take 10% off the bottles you carry home. The month also brings a few bookable extras, such as a Wine 101 class for new wine drinkers at Silver Oak and winemaker dinners. The recent roster ran the length of the valley, from Alexander Valley Vineyards, ACTA and J. Rickards to Jordan, Trione and Francis Ford Coppola.

Butter & Egg Days is Petaluma's salute to its farm history, the dairies and egg ranches that built the town. On one Saturday in April, a parade winds through historic downtown at noon, led off by the Clover Kids' Parade, and a street festival fills the downtown blocks from morning to late afternoon with food, beverage gardens, crafts, live music and areas for kids.

Passport to Dry Creek Valley is the Winegrowers of Dry Creek Valley's spring weekend: Saturday and Sunday of tastings at family wineries along Dry Creek and West Dry Creek Roads, each pairing its wines with a chef's bite and live music. It opens on Friday evening with the Twilight Welcome Party, a separately ticketed gathering of boutique wineries. Recent rosters have included Dry Creek Vineyard, Pedroncelli, Ridge Lytton Springs, Kokomo and the sparkling wines of Breathless, with more than fifty wineries taking part across the weekend.

The weekend opens with a Saturday-morning parade down Main Street, a long procession of local entries that ends, by tradition, with fire trucks spraying the crowd. Then the party moves to Ives Park, where two music stages, food and drink booths and local craft vendors run through the weekend.

A free preview party on the Friday evening before warms up downtown.

The Sonoma County Barrel Auction is Sonoma County Vintners' trade auction of one-of-a-kind wines. Member wineries make small lots that exist only for the auction, billed as never before, never again, and wine trade buyers bid on them as futures in lots of five to twenty cases. It takes place in Sonoma County each spring, in late April or early May, with a host venue that changes from year to year. Attendance is by invitation for the wine trade and media; it is not a public event.

The Bodega Bay Fisherman's Festival fills Westside Regional Park, on the edge of the harbor, for one weekend each spring. Both days revolve around the water: barbecued oysters, fish and chips and clam chowder at the food stalls, a wine booth pouring more than 25 Sonoma County wines, local beer and live music on the main stage.

On Sunday morning the decorated fishing boats parade out of the harbor to be blessed by local clergy.

Blossoms, Bees & Barnyard Babies is the spring tour of Sonoma County Farm Trails: one weekend in early May when dozens of farms, ranches and producers across the county open their gates to visitors. The tour is self-guided. You register for free, receive the map and the insider's guide, and draw your own route between the stops.

Expect young animals in the barns, behind-the-scenes farm tours, tastings of cheese, honey, cider and wine, hands-on workshops and farm stands selling straight from the field. Not every stop opens both days, so the guide is worth reading before you set out.

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.

Tuesdays in the Plaza is Healdsburg's summer evening concert series. From late May to late August, the City of Healdsburg puts a different band on the downtown Plaza every Tuesday from 6 to 8pm, fourteen weeks of free music on the square. Every week brings a new act, so no two Tuesdays sound quite alike.

The lineup is deliberately eclectic, built to reach every kind of listener, from funk and soul to rock and dance bands.

On Wednesday evenings from early May to mid-September, Sonoma Botanical Garden in Glen Ellen stays open until 8 for Acoustic Sunsets. Live music plays 5:30 to 7:30pm in the garden's grassy outdoor amphitheater, local Sonoma County vintners pour tastings, and guests bring picnics. Well-behaved dogs on leash are welcome.

The series is included with garden admission and free for members. It is a small, unhurried concert in a big garden, the kind of evening that ends with people lingering on the lawn after the last song.

On summer Wednesdays, downtown Santa Rosa closes Fourth Street and Old Courthouse Square for the county's big night market. For fourteen weeks from mid-May, farmers, chefs, artisans and makers set up along the streets, with local street food, craft beer and wine, and a concert stage running from 5pm until 9:30.

Admission is free. It is built for strolling: start at one end of the square and eat your way to the other.

Every Friday evening from late May into early September, the Cloverdale Arts Alliance turns the town plaza into an open-air venue. The street fair and market set up first, with local vendors cooking savory and sweet, and then a different band takes the stage each week for the evening concert.

Admission is free. Beer and Sonoma County wine are poured by the glass at the beverage booth, and what you spend there goes back to the Arts Alliance, which presents the series and books the music.

On Saturday afternoons from May to November, Walnut Park in downtown Petaluma hosts a certified farmers' market from 2 to 5pm. Local farms bring produce, eggs and honey, alongside meats and fish, artisan cheese and bread, canned goods, prepared food and handmade crafts, all set out under the trees of a small town square at Fourth and D streets.

It is run by Agricultural Community Events, the nonprofit that also manages Petaluma's year-round East Side market.

At the county's northern edge, Cloverdale's certified farmers' market sets up on Sunday mornings, 9:30am to 1pm, from April through November on West 2nd Street in the old downtown. It brings together local farmers, food purveyors and craftspeople, and it is run by the nonprofit behind the Santa Rosa Original Certified Farmers Market, the oldest in Sonoma County.

The scale is small and the pace unhurried: a Sunday errand that turns into a stroll through a quiet main street.

Sunday mornings from April into early December, the Windsor Town Green in Old Downtown Windsor fills with the Windsor Certified Farmers Market. Growers bring fruit, vegetables, meats, fish, honey and eggs; food makers add bread, cheese and preserves; local artists fill out the rows. In summer the market also runs on Thursday evenings, as part of the Summer Nights on the Green concert series. The market sets up at McClelland Drive and Market Street, on the green at the center of town.

The Healdsburg Farmers' Market is one of the oldest certified markets in California, and it now has a home of its own: the Foley Family Community Pavilion on North Street, a short walk from the Plaza. The Saturday market runs 8:30am to noon from April to December, and a Tuesday market runs 9am to 1pm from May through September. Both are run by the nonprofit Healdsburg Certified Farmers' Market.