My boyfriend and I had the chance to attend Pechanga’s annual wine festival last month due my company’s gracious gestures to their employees and was even more fortunate to be able to get tickets that allowed us to enter the festival before the standard ticket holders. Pechanga has their own parking structure with various parking spaces, but even then it gets REALLY crowded and hard to find around late evening/dinner time. We planned accordingly and arrived early at 11:00AM in the morning and found parking easily. I would definitely come early because the line to find parking gets crazy nuts, guaranteed. The line was at least a good 2 miles long around the time we left.

The casino is AMAZING. It’s clean and well built with very modern decor and lighting. I felt like I was at Vegas without being at Vegas. I’ve been to Morongo and Pala, Pechanga has them beat hands down in every aspect in my opinion. They are a indoor smoking casino so be wary to those that aren’t fond of smoke inhalation. We got in line and proceeded to enter the festival. It was because we got early entry tickets that it wasn’t too crowded and there weren’t any lines for the booths so we got a taste of many things that were available. We’re not much of wine drinkers but there were definitely enough booths that showcased food from Pechanga Casino’s multiple restaurants that line their beautiful building.

Upon entering you get your very own Pechanga wine glass and once inside they provide a center area of seating and standing tables where you can taste the wine and eat your food which I thought was very nice, although they filled up very quick. They also provided live music on their front stage. We roamed and checked out all the tables to see who the vendors were before trying them out.

We tried an array of different restaurant foods, some were so generous their their portions like one served a whole piece of bone lamb chop per person while another booth created full pita wraps. They had a wonderful dessert bar that served an array of fruits (huge strawberries and fresh blueberries), cake pops, brownies, chocolate fountain options, rice krispies. It was a sweet tooth’s haven!

We eventually found ourselves at an olive oil booth named “The Beautiful Olive“. They sell organic olive oil that is made into different flavors like basil olive oil, chili cilantro olive oil, etc. and balsamic vinaigrette in flavors like: pomegranate, mango, and strawberry. The female staff working there was really nice and let us sample some popular combination, boyfriend and I both fell in love with their basil olive oil and their traditional dark aged balsamic olive oil. We ended up purchasing the two for $36.00, although on the pricier side, but the quality and flavors are really amazing.

Once it hit 1:00PM the regular ticket holders were allowed in and that’s when the crowd and huge lines for food and wine started to form. I highly recommend the VIP tickets if you’re not one for crowds and lines. 🙂

For more photos of our time at Pechanga Casino’s Wine Festival, check them out here!

Rating: ★★★★☆
Address: 45000 Pechanga Pkwy, Temecula, CA 92592