Fall is the season this region does best. The harvest comes in, the heat breaks, and towns across the Sacramento Valley build their biggest weekends around food and drink. This is when the calendar fills itself.
Everything below is a recurring event. Dates shift year to year, so confirm before you drive out. The shape of the season does not change.
WHAT FALL ACTUALLY TASTES LIKE HERE
Sacramento sits in the middle of farms, orchards, ranches, and vineyards, which is why food and drink take over the community calendar in September, October, and November. You can eat dishes from the region’s chefs, try the food of a dozen other cultures, or spend a Saturday drinking wine grown in the county next door. Many of these events are built for families too, with live music and artisan markets alongside the food.
SEPTEMBER IS BEER, GREEK FOOD AND A GLOBAL FEAST
The El Dorado Hills Brewfest is an annual craft beer day in El Dorado Hills. Brewers from across the region pour IPAs, lagers, and stouts, with local food vendors, and cider, sake, and kombucha are on tap as well.
The Roseville Greek Food Festival is about the food first: dolmathes, souvlaki, gyro, and baklava, washed down with Greek wine or ouzo, the anise flavored aperitif. Greek music, folk dancing, and a specialty food market round it out.
The California Brewers Festival takes over Discovery Park, where one ticket gets you unlimited sips of beer plus cider, hard seltzers, kombucha, and wine. Global Feast Fest in Elk Grove is the free one, a celebration of cultures from around the world with international cuisine, craft beer and local wine, live music, and an artisan marketplace.
Taste of Davis and Yolo runs at the Odd Fellows Hall in downtown Davis, with local purveyors that have included Buckhorn Meat Co., Davis Creamery, Dunloe Brewing, and Turkovich Family Wines.
WINE COUNTRY PUTS ON ITS OWN WEEKENDS
Yolo Wine Night is the event to know if you want to taste a whole county in one evening. It runs at the Old Sugar Mill in Clarksburg, which holds 14 tasting rooms under one roof, with food trucks and live music.
The Wine and Food Affair at Great Bear Vineyards in Davis is the same idea at a slower pace, with a dozen Yolo County wineries pouring top scoring wines alongside small bites from local chefs. In Auburn, the Wine, Ale and Food Festival is a sip and stroll through the historic downtown. The Fair Play Harvest Wine Festival opens the estate wineries of El Dorado County, where the wines run to bold Zinfandel, Syrah, and Barbera.
OKTOBERFEST IS A WHOLE SEASON HERE
Oktoberfest here is not one weekend. It is a run. Placerville holds a free, all ages Oktoberfest with German food, craft beer, local wine, and a kid zone, plus a stein holding contest for the parents, a dachshund dash, and a giant zucchini contest with a costume contest for the best dressed zuke.
East Sacramento has the Turn Verein’s Oktoberfest, one of the largest and longest running in the region. Brats, schnitzel, and giant Bavarian pretzels, German beers, traditional music, dancing, and activities for kids.
THE FESTIVALS THAT ARE GENUINELY ABOUT FARMING
The Hoes Down Harvest Festival at Full Belly Farms in Guinda is the most farm forward weekend on the list. You eat from local eateries, learn about sustainable farming, watch a sheep shearing demonstration, and can camp overnight.
The Fruit Shed Fest in Loomis is a town celebrating the thing that built it. Loomis made its name on acres of orchards, with fruit shipped across the country on trains that stopped at the fruit sheds downtown, and that heritage gets marked each year with local food, live music, artisan vendors, and a kids’ market for young entrepreneurs.
The Mountain Mandarin Festival closes the fall in Roseville. Placer County grows mandarins, and this one is built around them: fresh picked fruit from local growers, plus mandarin donuts, mandarin beef jerky, mandarin barbecue sauce, and mandarin lotion, soap, and candles from local vendors.
The anchor of the season is Sacramento’s Farm-to-Fork celebration in September. The Grand Tasting is the centerpiece, a sampling of dishes from chefs around the region, and it incorporates the Legends of Wine showcase. The Tower Bridge Dinner, the long communal table set on the bridge, is part of the same run.
THE TRADE-OFFS: TICKETS, PARKING AND DISTANCE
Here is the honest part, because a list like this reads like a brochure otherwise. Fall is the busiest the region gets.
- The ticketed ones sell out. The Grand Tasting, the beer festivals, and the wine weekends sell tickets in advance, and the popular ones move fast. Wait until the week of and you are looking at a waitlist or next year.
- Parking is the bottleneck. Discovery Park, downtown Auburn, Placerville, and the Old Sugar Mill all fill up. Arrive at the open or plan on a walk.
- The distances are bigger than the map suggests. Guinda, Fair Play, and Clarksburg are farm towns, not suburbs. Pick one town per weekend instead of two.
- The weather does not cooperate evenly. The early September events are still hot. By the November weekends you want a jacket.
- Free does not mean easy. Global Feast Fest and the Placerville Oktoberfest do not charge at the gate, which is why their parking lots and food lines are the longest.
THE COMPARISON I REACH FOR, AND WHERE IT STOPS WORKING
The comparison I reach for is a county fair, and it mostly holds. This season is local, it is agricultural, and it is the same vendors and families coming back every year, which is the whole feeling of a fair.
Where it stops working is the geography. A county fair is one place on one weekend with everything inside one fence. This season is scattered across two counties and a dozen towns, and each weekend is its own trip. You are not choosing a fair. You are choosing which small town gets your Saturday.
Two things worth reading before you plan a trip around any of this. I keep every area guide in one place at the neighborhoods hub, and if you are still working out where you want to land, the buying process page walks the order things happen in.
Question for you: which one of these is worth a whole Saturday to you, the wine, the beer, or the small town festival? That answer tells me more than a list of features would.
Adapted from Wine, Beer, & Food Festivals to Look Out for This Fall, originally published by Windermere Signature Properties at windermerecalocal.com.
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