A monthly look at Arizona wine with Valley dining impresario Pavle Milic.
A monthly look at Arizona wine with Valley dining impresario Pavle Milic.
Desert DigestCheers to No Hangovers: Pick up a Bottle of Proxies Non-Alcoholic Wine at Select Sprouts in Phoenix
Pavle MilicSeptember 12, 2023
I’ve often wondered about the utility of having decaffeinated coffee. Like, what is the point? Obviously, the category is a money-maker, and the demand is there. Which brings me to the non-alcoholic beverage category. You could almost pose the same question: What is the point? A lot of folks are choosing to drink less. Pregnant women like to have NA options; designated drivers also do not want to just have a cranberry and soda; and...
“Tell me who you walk with and I will tell you who you are.” Loosely translated from an old Colombian saying, this is a favorite heuristic that I continue to apply in life. And it became even more significant when our winery, Los Milics, acquired its first vineyard in Elfrida. Although Juan Flores, our vineyard foreman, is good at his job, we wanted another perspective to fine-tune the way we approach viticulture. Enter Fritz Westover...
Desert DigestFood & DrinkPav on Juice: V-Day Bubbly
Pavle MilicFebruary 6, 2023
Valentine’s Day is like Campari and soda: Either you love it, or you hate it. The holiday has the usual built-in tropes associated with Hallmark cards, flowers, romantic dinners and popping Champagne corks. Of those, the bubbly remains my favorite Valentine’s Day stereotype – irrespective of relationship status. So instead of name-dropping and urging you to go get some Cristal or Dom, which will put a big hole on your wallet, let’s instead go the...
This time of year – harvest season – is imbued with reflection for the team at Los Milics Vineyards. Each vintage brings a new story and perspective. Precipitation coupled with harvest is not something desirable, but for better or for worse, part of the winemaking milieu here in Arizona. (Thanks for nothing, monsoons!) We had a very wet August both in Sonoita and at Jenny’s Vineyard located in Elfrida, and were forced to make picking...
As a wine buyer, one is exposed to a lot of wine. Over the last 13 years at my Valley restaurant, FnB, I’ve tasted thousands of new, strange wines. Two years ago, a distributor brought me a wine from Trentino-Alto-Adige, a wine region to the northeast of Italy. The grape was Teroldego from Azienda Agricola Foradori, and the wine was inky and deeply hued. It had the weight and gravitas of a burly Cabernet Sauvignon....
Which world wine region does Arizona compare to? It’s a question I’ve been answering for years. My answer? No other region. There are similarities in grape varietals to other regions. I have had Grenache from the south of France that mirrors our expressions of Grenache. A grape like Vermentino, through the lens of Sand-Reckoner, comes close to benchmarks from Corsica and Sardinia. Some qualities of our wine remind me of the Old World, like earth,...
I first tasted the wines from Cove Mesa Vineyard at the Oro Festival in Tucson in late winter and was instantly enamored of their Malvasia Bianca, replete with aromas of passion fruit and lychee and delivering puckering acidity. Additionally, I had their Picpoul Blanc, which was light and refreshing and brilliantly balanced. Meanwhile, their reds were imposing and robust. My personal enthusiasm for the Cornville-based winery got a big vote of confidence this past March,...
Planting a vineyard involves a great deal of work, from establishing the water source to developing the irrigation and trellis infrastructure. There’s also the small matter of deciding what to plant. When my team at Los Milics Vineyards was making these important decisions three years ago, we reached out to local winemakers to find out what would do well in our part of the world. Graciano made the cut. Native to the Rioja and Navarre...
2022 is here, and it’s fitting to reflect as we commence another year. Back in 2004, while driving south on Napa Valley’s Silverado Trail after helping at Neyers Vineyards with my friend Tadeo Borchardt, I whispered to myself that one day I would be involved in the world of making wine. Was I mollifying my own existential anxiety over the future by dreaming the impossible? Perhaps. “Be careful what you wish for,” the saying goes....