What is the azcentral Wine & Food Experience?
The azcentral Wine & Food Experience is the Arizona Republic’s tasting festival, a one-afternoon walk-around of restaurant samples, wine, beer, spirits and chef demonstrations that began in November 2015 at Scottsdale Fashion Square, spent 2016 through 2022 on the lawns of Salt River Fields at Talking Stick, and since 2023 has been held at High Street, the mixed-use district at 56th Street and the Loop 101 in north Phoenix. Gannett’s events division sells it now as the USA TODAY Wine & Food Experience, and the Phoenix edition is the one the whole national tour was copied from.
The 2026 Phoenix stop is Saturday, October 24, noon to 4 p.m., at 5415 E High St. There is a single ticket this year, The Tasting Experience, $75 through October 23 and $80 after, which buys a tasting cup, every sample on the grounds and the mixology classes. It is a 21-and-over event. Twenty minutes from Old Town up Scottsdale Road and across the 101, it is the biggest newspaper-backed tasting on the Valley calendar and the closest thing the north Valley has to the spring food festival Scottsdale lost in 2019.
Know what you are buying. The 2017 and 2019 editions were two-day productions with 60-plus restaurants in two pavilions and $180 celebrity chef sessions. The 2026 edition is one four-hour Saturday with one price, the chef list was not published as of mid-October, and the pleasure is the old one: a lot of Phoenix kitchens on one lawn, in the first cool weekend of October.
How to do it
Buy before October 23. The ticket steps from $75 to $80 at midnight on the 23rd and the enmotive registration page sells up to the day. There is no VIP tier in 2026 and no early-entry hour, which there was as recently as 2025 (noon entry for early admission, 1 p.m. general). Everyone comes in at noon.
Getting there and parking. High Street sits on the south side of the Loop 101 between 56th Street and Tatum, the Desert Ridge side of the freeway. From Old Town take Scottsdale Road north to the 101, go west two exits to 56th Street and turn south; 20 minutes with no traffic. The district has its own garages and surface lots, and the event listing says nothing about parking, so assume the usual Saturday scramble and park in a garage. A rideshare is the better idea: the pours start at noon and the way home is a freeway.
Arrive at noon. The pattern at every edition since 2015 has been the same: the restaurant tables are at full strength in the first hour, the demonstration stage runs early, and by 3 the popular stations are scraping trays. Walk the whole loop once before eating anything, then go back to the three tables worth a second visit.
Eat beforehand, drink water. Four hours of two-ounce pours in the desert sun is more wine than it sounds like. October 24 in Phoenix is typically in the mid-80s at 1 p.m.; wear a hat and real shoes, and use the water stations.
Pair it. The same weekend at Salt River Fields, the festival’s old home, the Spooktacular Hot Air Balloon Festival inflates its balloons October 23–25, and the Arizona Taco Festival and the fall Uncorked use those lawns earlier in the month. If you are staying out that way, see hotels near Talking Stick and Salt River Fields.
From Fashion Square to the ballpark lawn
The first azcentral.com Food & Wine Experience ran November 7–8, 2015, in the open air at Scottsdale Fashion Square, 11 to 5 both days, with more than 100 restaurants, wineries, breweries and distillers and a stage shared by Graham Elliot, Chuck Hughes, Nobuo Fukuda, Robert McGrath and Christopher Gross. It was produced for the Republic’s parent by R Entertainment, an experiential marketing firm, with Republic Media selling the sponsorships. A trade profile the following year put the first two editions at 11,000 guests combined, and the 2017 listing counted about 6,000 in 2016.
By 2017 it had moved to Salt River Fields at Talking Stick, the Diamondbacks’ and Rockies’ spring ballpark on the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community, and found its shape. The Grand Tasting was $85, good for either Saturday or Sunday, 1 to 4 p.m., with more than 60 restaurants across two pavilions. $120 bought VIP: noon entry, the AJ’s Fine Foods lounge, private winery pours and preferred parking. $180 bought the Chef’s Package, a private meet-and-greet with a visiting name. Cadillac presented. The Arizona bench that year included Jacques Qualin of J&G Steakhouse, Bernie Kantak of Citizen Public House, Chrysa Robertson of Rancho Pinot and Charles Wiley of Hearth ‘61; Mario Batali and Scott Conant had been earlier headliners.
The 2019 edition, November 2–3, was the peak: Alex Guarnaschelli and Antoni Porowski in $180 chef sessions, the Bella Twins pouring their Napa label, master sommelier Ian Cauble running seminars in a tent called The Cellar, Martha Stewart’s wine club at the bar, and a $50 presale on the Grand Tasting. The press release called it the founding event of USA TODAY’s ten-city Wine & Food Experience, from New York to Los Angeles, and that is the honest claim to fame: a Scottsdale tasting that a national newspaper chain decided to franchise.
What it became
The record goes quiet after 2019; the next edition anyone advertised was November 5, 2022, a single Saturday on the north soccer fields at Salt River Fields, $65 general and $100 for an Arizona Wine VIP lounge, and it sold out. In 2023 the Phoenix stop left the ballpark for High Street, November 4, with Talking Stick Resort as presenting sponsor. The 2024 tour listed Phoenix for November 2, and 2025 was November 8 at High Street, 1 to 4 with noon early entry, one of eight to ten cities on a tour run by USA TODAY Network Ventures, Gannett’s events arm. The azcentral branding faded from the ticket page along the way, and the 2026 date, October 24, is the earliest in its history.
It is worth being clear about what it did and did not replace. The Scottsdale Culinary Festival was a volunteer fundraiser that ran each April from 1978 until its last edition in 2019; the two events overlapped for five years and never shared an organizer. The one real link is R Entertainment, the Wine & Food Experience’s producer, which Scottsdale Arts brought in to relaunch the Culinary Festival in April 2020; COVID postponed that date and the festival never came back. The Valley’s newspaper tasting outlived the Valley’s arts-league picnic, and that is the sequence.
Why it belongs on a Scottsdale calendar
Scottsdale has no October food festival of its own anymore; what it has is a ring of them within twenty minutes. This one is the broadest sampler of Phoenix restaurants you can walk through in an afternoon, it is priced like a nice dinner for one, and it lands on the first weekend when standing outside at noon is a pleasure rather than a test. The serious cooking festival of the season is February’s Devour Culinary Classic at the Desert Botanical Garden, with a higher ticket and a juried chef list; this is the easier, cheaper, earlier version, and for a visitor who wants to taste thirty kitchens before picking three to book, it does the job. The Salt River Fields years, when it shared a ballpark calendar with the taco festival and the February Street Eats trucks, are a memory. High Street and a $75 cup are what is on offer, and on October 24 that is enough.