Drive past Frederica Golf Club most evenings in October and the gates are exactly what you'd expect from a private club on the island: quiet, closed, unremarkable from the road. On Thursday, October 22, 2026, that changes for one night. A tent goes up, valets appear, and a wine dinner featuring Berry Bros. & Rudd of London, Britain's oldest wine and spirits merchant, unfolds inside a clubhouse that has never before hosted a public-facing festival event.
That single addition is the whole story of how the St. Simons Island Wine Festival has changed heading into its third year. The festival didn't simply get bigger. It moved its entire calendar two days earlier, closed out a day sooner than last year, and put its newest, most exclusive night behind a gate that most people on this island have never had a reason to open.
Three Years, Three Different Festivals
The festival launched in 2024 as a two-day event, October 18 and 19, with a VIP Wine Tasting & Auction inside the ballrooms of The King and Prince Beach & Golf Resort on Friday night and a Grand Tasting the next afternoon at McKinnon-St. Simons Island Airport's Posh Carts Hangar. In 2025, organizers stretched that same format across three days, October 24 to 26, keeping the Friday tasting at the King and Prince and the Saturday Grand Tasting at the airport hangar, with the extra day added onto the back end of the weekend.
| Year | Dates | Span | What was new |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2024 (inaugural) | Oct 18-19 | 2 days | King and Prince tasting, Grand Tasting at McKinnon Airport hangar |
| 2025 (second annual) | Oct 24-26 | 3 days | Same two venues, third day added after Saturday's Grand Tasting |
| 2026 (third annual) | Oct 22-24 | 3 days | Collectors' Dinner at Frederica Golf Club opens the weekend; festival now closes Saturday |
Read the three rows together and a pattern breaks. The 2025 expansion tacked a day onto the end of the weekend, the low-key kind that doesn't need marketing copy. The 2026 expansion did the opposite. It added a day to the front, and it filled that day with the festival's most expensive, most exclusive event to date.
The Night That Didn't Exist Last October
The Collectors' Dinner runs Thursday, October 22, from 6 to 9 p.m., a multi-course meal paired with sommelier-curated wines and built around Berry Bros. & Rudd, a London merchant with a longer history than most of the wineries pouring at Saturday's Grand Tasting combined. Nothing like it existed in either of the festival's first two years. The King and Prince tasting was always the festival's premium tier, the place where a ticket bought you rare pours and a silent auction alongside the regular crowd. This year, that event slides down a rung. It's still happening Friday night, October 23, from 5:30 to 8 p.m., with premium wines, light fare, live music, and an art- and wine-centric silent auction that includes large-format bottles and resort stays. But it's no longer the top of the ladder.
Frederica Golf Club sits inside one of the island's private, gated communities, the kind of clubhouse that doesn't typically open its doors beyond its own membership. Turning a corner of it over to a public ticketed dinner, even a limited one, is a departure from how the festival has operated in its first two years. It signals that the organizers see room to grow the festival upward in price and access rather than just outward in days and headcount.
Why Saturday Is Now the Closing Night, Not the Middle One
The bigger structural shift is easy to miss if you only look at the new Thursday event and not at what happened to the rest of the calendar. In 2025, the festival ran Friday through Sunday. In 2026, it runs Thursday through Saturday. That's not a minor date nudge. It means the Grand Tasting at McKinnon Airport, long the festival's most recognizable and most attended event, has moved from the middle of the weekend to its final night.
For anyone who has treated the Grand Tasting as a Saturday-afternoon outing followed by a quiet Sunday to recover, that rhythm no longer applies. The festival now wraps entirely by Saturday night. There's no Sunday tail this year. Whatever your plans were for that Sunday in years past, this October it's simply a regular weekend day again, not a festival day.
What Doesn't Change: Friday at the King and Prince, Saturday at the Hangar
The two events longtime attendees already know are still where they've always been, just shuffled one slot later in the week. The Grand Tasting on Saturday, October 24, runs 2 to 5 p.m. at the Posh Carts Hangar and keeps the format that's defined the festival since 2024:
- More than 25 wineries pouring labels from California, Oregon, France, Italy, South Africa, Argentina, Austria, and Slovenia
- Live music and local art demonstrations running alongside the tastings
- Light bites and non-alcoholic drink options for anyone not drinking
- A commemorative wine glass with each ticket
If your plan has always been to show up Saturday afternoon, buy a ticket, and work your way through two dozen tables of wine under the hangar roof, none of that changes. What changes is what happens before you get there. Instead of that Saturday being sandwiched between a Friday tasting and a quiet Sunday, it's now the last thing on the calendar, the night the whole weekend builds toward rather than settles into.
Where the Ticket Money Actually Goes
The festival exists because of Glynn Visual Arts, an organization that has hosted community-focused arts programming on the island for more than seventy years. Proceeds also support the College of Coastal Georgia's Department of Hospitality, Tourism, and Culinary Arts, tying the festival directly to the same industry that staffs the restaurants and resorts most residents already know by name. That dual beneficiary structure hasn't changed across any of the three years, and it's worth remembering when you're deciding which tier of ticket makes sense for you. A Thursday night at Frederica costs more than a Saturday afternoon at the hangar, but both nights are funding the same two organizations.
Tickets, exact pricing, and the current schedule are posted directly through the St. Simons Island Wine Festival's official site, which is the most reliable place to confirm times before the weekend, since festival logistics can shift in the final weeks.
If the version of island life you're picturing includes a Thursday behind a golf club gate you've never opened, that's exactly the kind of neighborhood texture worth talking through before you ever look at a listing. GK Real Estate Advisors splits attention between wine glasses and closing tables happily, and we're glad to talk through what a season like this one actually looks like from the inside.
