Maui County Hawaii Kapalua Wine and Food Festival

Each early summer, the resort enclave of Kapalua on Maui’s northwest shore gives over four days to poured wines, plated courses, and long conversations with the people behind both. The gathering is published in organiser and press layers as the Kapalua Wine & Food Festival, and in 2026 those layers billed it as the forty-fifth Annual, running June 25 to 28 and centred on The Ritz-Carlton Maui, Kapalua. Yet it began in a different shape and under a different name — a symposium hosted by a hotel that no longer stands — and it still runs differently from most gatherings of its kind: there is no gate where one ticket settles everything, only a programme of separately priced events and passes spread across a single resort.

About

The published name in organiser and press layers is the Kapalua Wine & Food Festival. Its original 1981 form, in the press layers, was the Kapalua Wine & Food Symposium, and that symposium name belongs to the founding era, not to the modern event. The sheet title behind this article follows the current name’s sense, adjusting the ampersand into words.

Kapalua sits on Maui’s northwest shore, in the Lahaina area. It is not the county seat: Wailuku holds that role for Maui County, and any account that treats Kapalua as the island’s administrative centre has the geography wrong. The festival’s world is the Kapalua Resort, a cluster of hotels and venues rather than a single hall.

Who runs it depends on the era a layer describes. Press layers state that the festival was established by the not-for-profit Kapalua Wine Society. Later press layers, running from 2014 to 2023, say that for the past several years the festival has been operated under the nonprofit Kapalua Maui Charities. Those same layers add that a portion of proceeds benefits the University of Hawaii Maui College culinary program — a beneficiary note, recording where some money flows, and never an operator credit for the college.

Quick Facts

Item	Detail
Published name	Kapalua Wine & Food Festival
Original name, 1981	Kapalua Wine & Food Symposium
Setting	Venues throughout the Kapalua Resort, Maui’s northwest shore
County seat	Wailuku — Kapalua is not the seat of Maui County
Established	1981, by the not-for-profit Kapalua Wine Society, as the press layers state
Later operator	Kapalua Maui Charities, a nonprofit, in the 2014 to 2023 press layers
Recent centre	The Ritz-Carlton Maui, Kapalua, and its Aloha Garden Pavilion
Latest documented edition	The forty-fifth Annual, June 25 to 28, 2026
Admission	No single gate price — individual event tickets and festival passes
Beneficiary	A portion of proceeds supports the University of Hawaii Maui College culinary program

History

The founding, as the sources state it, is precise about credit. An organiser-derived press layer, repeated across years, records that the Kapalua Wine & Food Festival was established in 1981 by the not-for-profit Kapalua Wine Society. The same layers tell where the notion came from: the idea was crafted by vintner Robert Mondavi together with Eric Hansen, who was sommelier at the original Kapalua Bay Hotel. That idea credit is those layers’ account, and this article keeps it as exactly that.

For a useful comparison, see the Maui County Hawaii Maui Agricultural Festival for another county festival.

The inaugural gathering was a symposium, not yet the festival of later years, and it met at the Kapalua Bay Hotel. That hotel is gone. Press layers describe the Montage Kapalua Bay as standing on its site now, and note that the Montage hosted the Grand Tasting again in 2014 — a return, in a new building, to the ground where the event began.

The ordinal billings accumulate across the news and press layers: the thirty-third in 2014, the forty-first in 2022, the forty-second in 2023, the forty-third in 2024, the forty-fourth in 2025, and the forty-fifth in 2026. Those numbers are recorded here strictly as billings, the labels each year’s coverage carried. None of them is converted into a founding year, and none is reconciled aloud against the stated establishment in 1981; the press layers’ own sentence carries the founding, and the billings simply walk beside it.

Even the dates refuse to sit perfectly still. The forty-third edition is carried by most layers as June 6 to 9, 2024, yet one event-listing layer prints June 7 to 9 for that year. The variant stands unmerged in this account. The forty-fourth edition then stepped out of the June pattern altogether, running July 10 to 13, 2025, before the forty-fifth returned to June in 2026.

The operating credit also shifts as the layers move forward. The establishment story rests with the not-for-profit Kapalua Wine Society, while the press layers of 2014 through 2023 describe the festival as operated, for the past several years of their telling, under the nonprofit Kapalua Maui Charities. The beneficiary note appears in those same layers, assigning a portion of proceeds to the University of Hawaii Maui College culinary program. Founder body, later operator and beneficiary are three distinct roles in the record, and each is left exactly where its layer put it.

What to Expect

The programme, as organiser and press layers describe it, is built from encounters rather than spectacle. Interactive wine tasting seminars put vintners and master sommeliers in front of small audiences. Celebrity chef cooking demonstrations run beside ticketed chef dinners. Passholders are offered VIP winemaker receptions closed to ordinary ticket buyers.

The centrepiece of recent editions is the Grand Tasting Gala, staged in the Aloha Garden Pavilion at The Ritz-Carlton Maui, Kapalua in the 2024 to 2026 layers. The flagship tasting itself wears two closely related names across the years: a 2014 news layer prices Grand Tasting tickets, while the 2024 layers present a Grand Tasting Gala as the headline occasion. Both forms are recorded here in their own years rather than smoothed into one. Earlier layers describe a seafood festival as part of the gathering; that element belongs to its era and is kept there, not promised as a fixture of the modern programme.

Because the festival is sold event by event, two visitors can attend the same weekend and experience almost entirely different festivals — one following seminars and the gala, another collecting dinners and receptions — while both are legitimately at the Kapalua Wine & Food Festival.

Planning Your Visit

Kapalua rewards anyone who plans by event instead of by day, because no single purchase covers the weekend. Organiser and news layers describe a festival sold as individual event tickets and festival passes, with no single gate price at all. What a budget needs, then, is a shortlist: choose the gala, the seminars or the dinners first, and let the rest of the schedule arrange itself around them.

Prices exist only inside their years, and they are quoted here that way. A 2014 news layer priced Grand Tasting tickets at one hundred fifty dollars for Hawaii residents and one hundred sixty dollars for adults. Layers from 2024 put the Grand Tasting Gala at three hundred thirty-five dollars and a Festival Pass at one thousand two hundred twenty-five dollars, while a 2024 resort layer priced celebrity-chef dinners at two hundred forty-nine and three hundred ninety-five dollars — component dinners, never a general admission in disguise. No layer gathered here publishes a timeless tariff, and none of these figures should be carried into a future year as a promise.

Timing needs the same care. Most documented editions fall in June, but the forty-fourth moved to July 2025, and the 2024 span itself is printed two ways across layers. Confirm the current year’s dates and prices from the organiser before booking travel, and treat any older listing as history rather than as a schedule.

Lodging strategy follows from the venue pattern. The programme is scattered through venues across the Kapalua Resort rather than gathered onto one field, and recent editions centre on The Ritz-Carlton Maui, Kapalua. Staying inside the resort keeps every seminar, dinner and reception within a short stroll; staying elsewhere on the northwest shore means travelling in for each separately ticketed piece of a schedule you have assembled yourself, which argues for clustering your chosen events where the programme allows.

A Sample Itinerary for the 2026 Edition

What follows is framed on the documented forty-fifth edition — Thursday, June 25 to Sunday, June 28, 2026, centred on The Ritz-Carlton Maui, Kapalua — and is labelled as that edition’s shape, not a template guaranteed to repeat.

• Thursday: arrive, settle in, and open the weekend with an evening reception or first seminar session.
• Friday: build the day around interactive tasting seminars with vintners and master sommeliers, leaving the evening for a celebrity-chef dinner.
• Saturday: reserve the night for the Grand Tasting Gala in the Aloha Garden Pavilion, and keep the daytime lighter — a cooking demonstration, then rest.
• Sunday: close with a final tasting or reception before leaving Kapalua.

How It Compares

The Hawaii Food & Wine Festival is a separate, multi-island festival; despite the similar vocabulary of chefs and tastings, it shares no organisation, venue or history with Kapalua’s gathering, and nothing from its record belongs here. The Maui County Fair and the Maui AgFest are likewise different events, based in Wailuku rather than at the Kapalua Resort, and neither contributes a fact to this account — including anything about the AgFest’s own name history, which is its story to tell, not this festival’s.

Within Maui’s calendar, Kapalua’s event is the resort-bound outlier: a festival assembled from priced pieces instead of entered through a gate.

A Visitor’s Checklist

• Confirm the current edition’s dates, since one recent edition moved to July and one year’s span is printed two ways
• Decide between individual event tickets and a festival pass before prices for your chosen events sell through
• Treat every published price as belonging to its year, never as a standing tariff
• Book the Grand Tasting Gala early if the Aloha Garden Pavilion evening is your centrepiece
• Keep one evening free for a celebrity-chef dinner, priced as its own component
• Remember that Kapalua is not the county seat — county business belongs to Wailuku

Beyond the Resort

Kapalua itself is a small resort community, and the festival deliberately fills it: venues throughout the Kapalua Resort host the programme, so the walk between a seminar and a dinner is part of the event’s texture. The ground carries its own quiet footnote at the Montage Kapalua Bay, which occupies the site of the original Kapalua Bay Hotel where the 1981 symposium met.

The festival’s reach beyond the resort runs through its beneficiary. The press layers that name Kapalua Maui Charities as operator add that a portion of proceeds benefits the University of Hawaii Maui College culinary program, tying four days of fine dining to the training of Maui’s next kitchen generation.

There is also a contrast worth noticing between the festival’s home and the county’s. Kapalua, in the Lahaina area, hosts visitors; Wailuku, the county seat, runs Maui County. The festival has never needed the machinery of the seat to sustain itself — its continuity comes from the resort, its operators and its returning audience of wine people.

Why It Matters

Few American food and wine gatherings can point to a stated establishment in 1981 and a billing line that reaches a forty-fifth Annual in 2026. The Kapalua event also preserves, in its own retelling, the moment when a vintner of Robert Mondavi’s stature helped sketch a wine symposium at a small Hawaiian resort hotel — and when that sketch grew, over decades, from symposium into festival. No attendance figure is published in the layers gathered for this article, so its significance is argued from longevity and continuity rather than from crowds: the same resort, the same early-summer slot in most years, and a proceeds line that still points at culinary students.

Its structure carries a significance of its own. A festival with no gate, sold seminar by seminar and dinner by dinner, survives only if each individual event earns its ticket again every year. Four decades of billings, whatever their exact arithmetic, suggest that Kapalua’s audiences kept deciding that it did.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does one ticket actually buy at this festival?

Exactly one event, unless you hold a pass. Organiser and news layers describe sales as individual event tickets and festival passes, with no single gate price: a seminar ticket buys that seminar, a dinner ticket buys that dinner, and the 2024 layers priced the Grand Tasting Gala and the Festival Pass as separate purchases again.

Did the event really start life as a symposium?

That is what the press layers record. The 1981 original was published as the Kapalua Wine & Food Symposium, held at the Kapalua Bay Hotel, and the festival name belongs to the later form of the gathering. The symposium title is a founding-era name, not an alternate billing for the modern event.

Why do the 2024 dates appear in two different spans?

Because the layers disagree and this article does not merge them. Most news and press layers carry the forty-third edition as June 6 to 9, 2024, while one event-listing layer prints June 7 to 9. Both forms are recorded; the shorter listing is neither corrected nor adopted.

Has any layer ever published a crowd count for the festival?

No. Organiser, press and news layers document dates, venues, programmes and prices in detail, but none of the layers gathered states an attendance figure, so none is estimated here either.

What to Expect From the Next Maui County Hawaii Kapalua Wine and Food Festival

How often is Maui County Hawaii Kapalua Wine and Food Festival held?

The documented record shows an edition in each year from 2022 through 2026, billed in sequence from the forty-first to the forty-fifth Annual, with earlier billings reaching back to the thirty-third in 2014 — a yearly rhythm in the layers, even though the founding itself rests on the press layers’ stated 1981 establishment.

When is the next Maui County Hawaii Kapalua Wine and Food Festival?

No 2027 edition is announced in the record gathered. The latest documented edition is the forty-fifth, held June 25 to 28, 2026, and any future date would rest on the organiser’s own announcement rather than on the early-summer pattern alone.

Will the dates change?

The documented run already contains one such shift. Most editions documented here fall in June, yet the forty-fourth edition ran July 10 to 13, 2025, and even the 2024 span is printed two ways in different layers. A planner should expect an early-summer festival, and verify the exact days each year.

Closing

From a symposium at a vanished hotel to a forty-fifth Annual centred on a garden pavilion, the Kapalua Wine & Food Festival has kept its founding bargain intact: small rooms, serious wine, named chefs, and tickets sold honestly, one event at a time.