Disney California Adventure Food & Wine Festival
The Disney California Adventure Food & Wine Festival is an annual food and beverage festival held each spring at Disney California Adventure in the Disneyland Resort, California. Modelled on the much larger Epcot International Food & Wine Festival at Walt Disney World, it differs from its Florida counterpart in scope and subject: its marketplaces, demonstrations and seminars are devoted to the produce, cooking, wines and craft beers of California rather than to international cuisine. The festival was first held in 2006 and is included with regular park admission.
History
The festival launched in spring 2006, in the park's fifth year, with a programme of marketplace kiosks, wine and beer tastings, cooking demonstrations and winemaker events extending into the resort hotels. It ran annually through 2010, growing in length and attendance, with the 2010 edition running daily from April 16 to May 31.
The festival then entered a long hiatus. California Adventure underwent a major reconstruction in the early 2010s, culminating in the opening of Buena Vista Street and Cars Land in 2012, and the event was not staged from 2011 to 2015. It returned in 2016 — initially on spring weekends only, following the park's successful use of the same footprint for seasonal food offerings — and expanded back to a daily, multi-week run in 2017.
The 2020 festival opened on February 28 but was cut short after roughly two weeks when the Disneyland Resort closed in March 2020 at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. No festival was held in 2021; in its place the park mounted A Touch of Disney, a limited-capacity ticketed event that reused festival dishes. The full festival resumed from March 4 to April 26, 2022, and has run annually since, typically for seven to eight weeks ending in late April. The 2026 edition ran from March 6 to April 27.
Marketplaces
The festival's core is a line of Festival Marketplaces along the Performance Corridor and into Paradise Gardens Park, each themed to a California ingredient, region or cooking style. Menus change annually and run to more than 80 items across the event in recent editions, served in tasting portions. A Sip and Savor Pass, sold as a lanyard of redeemable tabs, allows guests to prepay for a set of marketplace items and selected dishes at participating park restaurants.
Cooking demonstrations, beverage seminars and junior-chef activities for children — in recent years themed to Goofy — fill out the programme, and live bands perform on the Palisades Stage in Paradise Gardens. Festival dishes also appear at locations in Downtown Disney and the resort hotels.
Soarin' Over California
The festival has developed an association with Soarin' Over California, the original film of the park's Soarin' attraction, which was replaced in regular operation by Soarin' Around the World in 2016. The California film has returned for limited engagements several times, and during recent festivals — including 2026, as part of the park's 25th anniversary year — it has again been presented for the duration of the event, making the festival period the most reliable time to see the original version.
Comparison with Epcot
Where Epcot's festival presents national pavilions and runs for months in the autumn, the California Adventure event is a spring festival of about two months built around a single state's agriculture and wine regions, including Napa, Sonoma and the Central Coast. Its success after the 2016 revival led the park to adopt the same marketplace model for its winter Disney Festival of Holidays.