Search "wine tasting near Placitas" and the same name keeps surfacing: Anasazi Fields Winery, tucked on Camino de los Pueblitos on the western edge of the old village. The listings show hours, a phone number, five-star reviews describing bonfires and oak-aged plum wine. What they don't show is that the winery is gone. American Winery Guide flags it flatly as permanently closed. Menupix lists it as reported closed. Yelp's business page carries the same status update.
None of that is a knock on the place. Wineries close, owners move on, and directory pages lag behind reality by years. But if you've lived in Placitas long enough to remember when Anasazi Fields hosted the mid-November arts and crafts show, or if you're new enough to have found it through a travel site last week, the gap between what the internet says and what's actually happening on Camino de los Pueblitos is worth closing. Because the role that winery used to play in this village hasn't disappeared. It just moved a few hundred yards down the same road, and the fall calendar built around it is already running.
The Winery That Replaced the Winery
Placitas Winery sits at 26 Camino de los Pueblitos, the same address associated with the old winery in some outdated listings, though it's a separate operation with its own history. Barb and Ty Belknap bought the four-acre property in 2018, and their son Evan, who came to winemaking through his earlier work fermenting beer and kombucha, has been the vintner since. The winery has been producing small-batch dry fruit wine since 2019: crabapple, pear, wild cherry, plum, and apricot, each aged on oak, sold for eight dollars a glass on the grounds or twelve dollars for a half bottle to go.
What matters more than the wine list is what the space has become. The property includes a 4,200-square-foot open-air adobe pavilion, a 6,800-square-foot outdoor celebration area with shaded seating, and parking for more than a hundred cars, and the Belknaps have been steadily filling that space with the kind of programming Placitas used to expect from its older winery. Barb Belknap has described the plan directly: they're revitalizing the space for community events, with bands, poetry readings, art shows, and wine tastings.
Here's the quick version of what changed and what didn't:
| Anasazi Fields Winery | Placitas Winery | |
|---|---|---|
| Status | Permanently closed, per current business directories | Open, hosting public events and private rentals |
| History | Longtime Placitas fixture, known for a mid-November arts and crafts show | Operating since 2019 under the Belknap family |
| Known for | Dry, oak-aged fruit wines from local orchards | Fruit wine tastings, art shows, concerts, and weddings in a 4,200-square-foot pavilion |
If you're planning a fall weekend around wine and live music in the village, this is the address that's actually taking reservations.
The Fall Calendar Is Already Dated
The Placitas Chamber of Commerce keeps a running events calendar, and reading it against today's date tells you something small but real about how the season is shifting. Back in August, the Placitas Seller's Market ran from 7 a.m. to 1 p.m., with organizers telling regulars to come early and beat the summer heat. Starting in September, the market moved its start time an hour later, to 8 a.m., with sale dates on the 12th and the 26th. Nobody announced that shift as a headline. It's just what happens when the mornings cool off enough that vendors no longer need the earliest possible start. If you missed the market on the 12th, the next one lands September 26, still running 8 a.m. to 1 p.m., still full of the secondhand furniture, tools, and local crafts that have made it a Placitas fixture for years.
The bigger date on the calendar is September 20, when the Placitas Artists Series opens its 40th season. The afternoon starts at 2 p.m. with a visual arts exhibit and artist reception, followed by a pre-concert talk, before pianist Jon Nakamatsu takes the stage at 3 p.m. for a solo performance. Forty seasons is a long run for a concert series in a village this size. The series produces its annual music performances and art exhibitions out of the Historic Las Placitas Presbyterian Church, a 19th-century adobe building that also anchors the village's holiday events later in the year.
The Village's Other Anchors
Two more institutions round out what's actually running in Placitas right now, and neither shows up in a generic neighborhood guide.
Wild Hearts Gallery, at the Homestead Village Shopping Center on NM-165, is an artist collective of 14 members working in painting, pottery, sculpture, printmaking, photography, jewelry, woodworking, glass, fiber, and mosaic. It's a working gallery, not a seasonal pop-up, and it's one of the six sites that carries the village's biggest annual event each November.
The Placitas Studio Tour, meanwhile, is quietly gearing up for a milestone. The chamber's calendar notes the tour is recruiting a volunteer vice president for its board, with an eye toward its 30th anniversary season in 2027. Thirty years of open studios is the kind of longevity that tells you something about how many working artists actually live and sell out of this village, year after year, without much fanfare.
The Placitas Community Library rounds out the trio. Beyond the usual programming for kids and adults, the library runs its own art gallery and meeting space, and it's currently looking for volunteers to help keep both running.
The Trails Locals Actually Walk This Time of Year
Fall is when Placitas hiking gets good again, and the trail network here is bigger than most people who've lived here for years realize. The Cibola National Forest's Placitas Trailhead system connects to a mix of routes rated for hikers, mountain bikers, and horseback riders, and a few come up again and again in local trip reports.
The Strip Mine and Chalk Dust Loop is the most popular route in the area, a 4.7-mile moderate hike that passes a historic mining district and takes a little over two hours to complete. Tunnel Springs Loop is the other regular favorite, a 4.2-mile route with real elevation gain through varied terrain. For an easier outing, the Mustang Alley, Bootleg, Bobsled, and Fence Line Trails Loop covers three miles of hard-packed earth and rocky singletrack, and the Sandia Man Cave Trail offers a 3.3-mile route through desert foothills that's approachable for newer hikers.
Beyond the forest service trails, the Las Placitas Association manages a 560-acre parcel of Albuquerque open space just off NM-165, about two and a half miles east of I-25, with gentle trails suited to wildflower walks and birdwatching rather than serious mileage. Between the association's parcel and the national forest system, Placitas has more accessible trail options within a short drive of the village center than its size would suggest, and September through November tends to be when locals actually use them, once the summer heat backs off and before winter closes in on the higher routes.
What's Circled on the Calendar Next
All of these threads converge in November. The Placitas Holiday Market returns for its seventh year on November 21 and 22, 2026, running 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. across six sites on or near Highway 165, including Wild Hearts Gallery, the Placitas Community Library, Placitas Winery, and the Historic Las Placitas Presbyterian Church. Each site benefits a different local cause, from the library's programs to the elementary school's art and music budget to the Placitas Artists Series itself. It's the same weekend the village has used for its biggest arts and crafts event for decades, dating back to a fine arts and crafts sale that ran for 38 years before it was reorganized into today's multi-site format after 2020.
None of this required a real estate transaction to notice. It's just what a fall in Placitas actually looks like once you stop trusting the first search result and start checking what's currently open.
If you're weighing what a home in Placitas is actually worth, whether you're settled in for another season of Seller's Market Saturdays or starting to think about what comes next, The Lovely Home Company knows this village block by block, trail by trail. Schedule a free consultation whenever you're ready to talk it through.
