A monthly look at Arizona wine with Valley dining impresario Pavle Milic.
When my boss at PHOENIX asked for an update on my winery project, Los Milics Vineyards, it hit me: It’s been eight years since my wife, Ita, and I moved to Sonoita-Elgin to break ground.
The last time I used this space to write about my wine “journey” was August 2024, when we were close to welcoming guests to stay on-site. Those nine casitas – positioned for front-row views of the Mustang Mountains – have now been operating for more than a year and a half.
Since then, we were featured in Food & Wine with a generous 12-page spread that highlighted not just our property, but Arizona winemaking as a whole. We also opened a matchbox-size tasting room in Old Town Scottsdale. It’s about to move across the street, where we’ll finally have space to serve food – mostly fresh-pulled mozzarella. (Who doesn’t want that?)
Which brings me to the point of this column, and perhaps the final “phase” of any winemaking startup: the full-size, off-site tasting room. At the end of January, we opened Los Milics Restaurant and Tasting Room in downtown Tucson, on the corner of Congress Street and Scott Avenue. The reason is simple: Not everyone can make the drive to wine country as often as they’d like. This gives our guests and wine club members a closer, more immediate way to drink our wines. More than that, it brings Arizona’s agricultural story to the city, where more people can engage with it.
I’ll admit, though – nothing beats Sonoita and Elgin. The big skies. The quiet. The rolling hills that make you slow down, whether you mean to or not.
One more thing: We’re also working toward another tasting room in northeast Tucson. More soon. But maybe not in this column. “Volume XI” has a nice, final ring to it!
