Kapalua has run a wine and food festival every summer since 1981, when the Kapalua Wine Society founded the event to educate visitors on fine wine alongside the resort experience. That makes it the oldest wine and food festival of its kind in the United States — genuinely older than the modern American food-festival industry. Back in the early 1980s, the idea of pairing California winemakers with celebrity chefs in a resort setting was novel. Today it’s a whole cottage industry, and Kapalua has been doing it longer than almost anyone. Forty-five years in, this year’s edition is one of the strongest-looking programs in recent memory.

If you’re planning a Maui trip for late June and you’re at all interested in wine, food, or both, this is the event to know about.

The 45th annual Kapalua Wine & Food Festival runs June 25–28, 2026, anchored at The Ritz-Carlton Maui, Kapalua on the northwest corner of the island. The resort is the historic home of the festival and hosts the headline dinners and seminars, with additional events spread across the Kapalua resort area. The festival is a four-day immersive program of seminars, tastings, multi-course dinners, and mixology experiences.

The official festival site at kapaluawineandfoodfestival.com has the full schedule and ticketing. Individual event tickets and multi-day festival passes are both available; early-access pricing ran through March 31, so as of April, standard pricing applies.

Per the festival’s official lineup announcement and follow-up coverage in Wine Industry Advisor, the 2026 edition is built around a few marquee events:

Signature Winemaker & Celebrity Chef Dinner — Friday, June 26. The headline Friday-night dinner is a multi-course affair at The Ritz-Carlton Maui, Kapalua, with celebrity chefs Maneet Chauhan (Food Network, Nashville), Antonia Lofaso (Top Chef), and Zach Laidlaw (Hua Momona Farms, winner of Best of the Fest at the 2025 festival) collaborating on the menu. Each course is paired with a featured winemaker from a participating vineyard. This is the headline ticket of the weekend.

Three Celebrity Chef Cooking Demonstration Luncheons. The festival is also hosting a trio of daytime chef demonstration luncheons, each built around a different celebrity chef and wine partner. The marquee session is Bryan and Michael Voltaggio’s “Let’s Hear it for the Boys” — the first-ever joint Maui appearance by the Top Chef–winning brothers, paired with wines from Hartford Court and Williams Selyem. Antonia Lofaso also leads a separate “Italian Garden Feast — Maui Style” demonstration. These daytime sessions are generally a better value than the big-ticket evening dinners if you’re trying to see the chefs up close.

Lifetime Achievement Tribute — Jean-Charles Boisset. The 2026 festival is honoring Jean-Charles Boisset with a Lifetime Achievement Award alongside an exploration of the World of Boisset Wines. Boisset is the head of one of the most interesting family-owned wine businesses on the planet — Burgundy roots, a Napa/Sonoma portfolio that includes Buena Vista Winery and Raymond Vineyards, and a reputation for theatrical tasting experiences. The seminar/tribute is one of the unique draws for serious wine fans this year.

Bubbles & Bumps Seminar. A Moët Hennessy champagne seminar pairing iconic French champagnes with Petrossian caviar. Not subtle, and not cheap, but exactly the kind of experience the festival is built around. Expect it to sell out first.

Death & Co. Mixology Residency. Death & Co., the Manhattan cocktail bar that opened on New Year’s Eve 2006 and became one of the defining rooms of the craft-cocktail revival, is bringing a residency to the Alaloa Lounge at The Ritz-Carlton Maui, Kapalua. The residency includes a signature cocktail menu and a hands-on mixology class. If you’re a cocktail person and you’ve never made it to Death & Co.’s New York, Los Angeles, Denver, or Washington, D.C. locations, this is the closest you’re going to get in Hawaiʻi.

Additional seminars, tastings, wine dinners, and the Grand Tasting Gala round out the four-day schedule. The full calendar is on the festival site.

Kapalua Wine & Food Festival is a luxury-resort event, not a fairgrounds food festival. That sets the tone for everything — the tickets, the dress code, the food, and the attendees. If you’re used to mainland food festivals with folding tables and plastic tasting cups, this is a different world.

It’s structured around seated events. Most of the programming is ticketed as individual sessions — a Friday-night dinner, a Saturday-morning seminar, a Grand Tasting on Saturday afternoon, a mixology class on Sunday. You pick the specific experiences you want and buy tickets for those.

Dress is resort-casual to dressy. Think the kind of thing you’d wear to a nice dinner at a Wailea resort — collared shirts, nice sandals, a sundress. Nobody’s in black tie. Nobody’s in flip-flops. Men do not need jackets. Women often bring a light wrap for air-conditioned ballrooms.

Wine-forward, but food matters. The chef programming has gotten noticeably stronger in the last five years. If you’re coming for the food and the wine is a bonus, you’ll still be very well taken care of.

Expect to spend serious money. Between tickets, a Kapalua hotel night or two, dinner outside of festival events, and a rental car, a couple attending one or two headline events will spend in the low four figures all-in. Festival passes for multiple events offer better per-event value than single tickets.

The most convenient option is The Ritz-Carlton Maui, Kapalua itself — the headline events are on-property, and rolling out of a 10 p.m. wine dinner into an elevator back to your room is the single best argument for the price premium. The resort runs a festival-weekend rate package most years; check the festival site for current offers.

Montage Kapalua Bay is the other high-end option in Kapalua, a short drive from the Ritz, and a frequent stay for festival attendees. Napili Kai Beach Resort and the condos along Napili and Kahana are a step down in price while staying within a 5-to-10-minute drive. If you’re willing to drive a bit further, Kāʻanapali is 10–15 minutes south along Honoapiʻilani Highway — the Hyatt Regency, Westin Kāʻanapali Ocean Resort Villas, Westin Maui, and the Royal Lahaina Resort all put you within easy range.

Important: Do not plan to drive back to Kīhei or Wailea after a wine dinner. The drive is 45–60 minutes each way even in daytime, and the last thing you want after a five-course pairing dinner is an hour behind the wheel on Honoapiʻilani Highway. Stay on the west side for the festival.

You can compare Kapalua-area hotel options on Kapalua’s own accommodations page and our Maui hotels and resorts guide. For rental cars — you’ll want one for the three-day stay even if you’re mostly at the resort — Discount Hawaii Car Rental is our standing recommendation across every island.

June 25–28 lands the weekend before the Fourth of July peak-travel bump, which is actually one of the best windows for a Maui trip all summer. The weather is typically hot and dry on the west side, trade winds are reliable, and the ocean is at its calmest for snorkeling on Maui’s south and west shores.

A sample trip structure: fly in Wednesday or Thursday, festival events Friday and Saturday, bonus Maui days Sunday and Monday, fly out Tuesday. That gives you two real days to do the things that make Maui Maui — a Haleakalā sunrise on your arrival day (before jet lag hits), a morning Molokini snorkel, some time on the Kapalua-area beaches (Kapalua Bay Beach is one of the best snorkel spots on the whole west side), and a chance to recover from the richer festival meals with lighter days of ocean and beach.

If you’d rather keep the trip tight, a four-night Thursday-to-Monday shape works well — Thursday arrival, Friday headline dinner, Saturday Grand Tasting plus one other event, Sunday recovery day with a long morning on the beach, Monday departure.

Head to the official Kapalua Wine & Food Festival site and the Purchase Tickets page. You can buy individual event tickets (for a single seminar, dinner, or class) or multi-event festival passes. Early-access pricing ran through March 31, so prices from April forward reflect the standard tier.

A few buying tips:

Buy the headline events first. The Friday-night celebrity chef dinner, the Grand Tasting Gala, the Death & Co. mixology class, and the Moët/Petrossian seminar are the ones that sell out first. If you know you want any of those, lock them in before anything else.

Check dinner capacities. Seated dinners have strict capacity limits — usually 100–150 guests depending on venue — and they go fast once they’re publicly listed. Daytime seminars and general tastings have more capacity.

Book the hotel at the same time. Ritz-Carlton Maui, Kapalua and nearby Kapalua-area properties fill around festival weekend. Do not buy the event tickets and then figure out the hotel — it’s the other way around.

Check dietary restrictions up front. Most festival dinners can accommodate vegetarian and major allergens if you flag them at booking. Trying to work it out at the door never goes smoothly.

If the late-June dates don’t work but you want a taste of the festival vibe on Maui, the Kapalua resort area has a lively year-round food and wine scene. Merriman’s Kapalua, Burger Shack at the Ritz, the farm-to-table program at Plantation House Restaurant (on the Plantation Course), and the dining at Montage Kapalua Bay all punch well above typical resort fare. The same producers the festival features — California winemakers, neighbor-island farmers, local fishermen — supply the kitchens year-round.

And if you want to plan a broader food-focused trip to Maui, our Hawaiʻi for Foodies guide has more dining picks across the island. For general Maui planning, our best time to visit Maui guide covers the weather and cost patterns for summer travel.