What is the Waterfront Fine Art & Wine Festival?
The Scottsdale Waterfront — the canal-bank promenade between Fashion Square and Old Town, redeveloped in the 2000s — was designed to hold exactly this. Each winter, Thunderbird Artists, the family-owned company that has run Arizona’s juried art festivals since 1981, lines the walkway and the Southbridge with about 125 artists’ booths, sets up a tasting tent of Arizona wineries and distilleries, puts a band on the Sanderson Lincoln Pavilion, and charges five dollars to walk through.
The art is juried and real: oil painters, bronze and stone sculptors, glassblowers, coppersmiths, photographers, jewelers, most of them working professionals on the Southwest circuit. The wine is the state’s own — Verde Valley, Sonoita, Willcox — poured by the people who made it, alongside meaderies and chocolatiers. And the setting is the show’s argument: the Arizona Canal in winter light, the Waterfront’s towers behind, Old Town’s galleries a block south.
Launched around 2012, the festival is heading into its 16th edition on January 29–31, 2027, and was voted the Valley’s best annual event in the producer’s 2026 awards. It’s the kind of event that succeeds quietly, year after year, because it’s exactly as pleasant as it sounds.
How to do it
Friday is the connoisseur’s day. The festival’s Saturday usually coincides with Western Week and the Parada del Sol parade in Old Town, which is wonderful for the city and terrible for the Waterfront garages. Friday morning at 10, you’ll park under Fashion Square, walk the whole loop in an hour, and talk to artists who aren’t yet hoarse.
Do the loop, then the tent. The booths run along the canal’s north bank and across the Southbridge; walk it all once before buying anything — prices for comparable work vary by booth more than you’d expect. Then the wine tent: buy the two-person package ($60 for two admissions, two glasses, and 20 tastings), and split it over two days if you’re local. Arizona wine has improved dramatically; the Willcox reds and Sonoita whites are the safe bets.
Music and food. The pavilion stage runs live sets through the afternoon; the Waterfront’s restaurants — patios overlooking the canal — are the lunch plan, and the wine glass is welcome on most of them.
Practical: hours are 10–5; late January is 68 and bright, and the canal walkway has little shade. Parking has been free in the Waterfront and Fashion Square structures. If you want more art the same weekend, the Celebration of Fine Art tents are running north on Hayden and the Thursday ArtWalk is a block away.
Thunderbird Artists and the festival circuit
Arizona’s outdoor art festivals are an industry, and Judi Combs built a large part of it. Thunderbird Artists, founded in 1981, produced its first juried fine-art show in Scottsdale in 1992 and went on to run dozens of festivals a year in Carefree, Fountain Hills, Scottsdale, and across the state — the circuit that lets working artists sell direct to the winter population without a gallery’s cut. Its shows are juried, which keeps the quality consistent, and its addition of Arizona wine in the 2000s gave them a second draw as the state’s wine industry matured.
The Waterfront show, launched around 2012, was the company’s bid for Old Town’s center. The venue had just come into its own: the canal banks had been rebuilt as a promenade with public art and restaurants, the Southbridge development had added a second stage, and the city was actively programming the water — Canal Convergence began the same year. An art-and-wine festival was the daytime, winter complement to the canal’s November light show.
Why it works
Scottsdale has bigger art events — the ten-week Celebration of Fine Art, the collector-driven Art Week — but the Waterfront festival occupies a niche none of them do: a three-day, five-dollar, wine-in-hand walk through good art in the middle of downtown, at the exact moment the season peaks. It doesn’t need to grow. It needs the weather to hold, which in late January it almost always does.