What is Carlson Creek Vineyard?
Arizona’s wineries are three hours from most of their customers, so the smart ones moved their tasting rooms to where the customers already are. Carlson Creek Vineyard did it on Marshall Way, in the middle of Scottsdale’s gallery district, and its room is one of the biggest and easiest on the Old Town circuit.
The winery is a family-owned estate in Cochise County, near Willcox, the high desert plain in the state’s southeast corner that grows most of Arizona’s wine grapes. Carlson Creek was founded in 2008, holds the state’s 17th winery license, and farms at about 4,300 feet, where hot days and cool nights do for grapes what the low desert never could. The list runs to French, Italian and Spanish varieties: crisp whites and rosé, and the rhone-style reds that are Willcox’s specialty.
The Scottsdale room is a renovated former art gallery of about 2,300 square feet, which suits the street. A 20-foot copper bar runs along one side, a barrel-stave installation covers a wall, the ceiling is art deco, and local artists’ work rotates through. There is a private room for events and wine education, and the size means a group of friends can walk in without taking the place over.
It is the kind of tasting room that converts people who arrive skeptical. The wine tasting guide calls it a bright, busy room that is good for groups, and that is the right way to use it.
How to taste here
The flight is the point. A tasting is $25 for five wines of your choice. Build it from light to heavy: one white or the rosé, then the reds. If the Rule of Three, the winery’s grenache, syrah and mourvèdre blend, is open, put it in the flight. Ask the staff where each wine grew and what the vintage did; Arizona seasons swing with the monsoon, and the people behind the bar know the answers.
Time it to your mood. Weekday afternoons are quiet, and the staff have time to talk. Thursdays bring the ArtWalk crowd, which turns the room into part of the gallery night. Friday and Saturday evenings are the busiest. The room opens in the early afternoon most days, later on Mondays through Wednesdays in summer, so check the current hours on the winery’s site.
Walk the cluster. Carlson Creek sits across Marshall Way from the Los Milics tasting room and shares its 4142 street number with Wilde Meyer Gallery, the gallery that started this block. Passion Cellars is a short walk north at the Fifth Avenue horse fountain, and Salvatore Vineyards is a few minutes beyond on Stetson Drive. For dinner, Ponderosa House is at the Indian School end of the street.
Buy a bottle. Very little Arizona wine leaves the state, and buying a bottle usually does more for you than a second flight. If you are in town for a while, ask about the Wine Society, the winery’s club, which gets members limited releases.
Willcox wine comes to the gallery street
For most of Scottsdale’s history, Arizona wine was a curiosity. The state’s first federally recognized growing area, Sonoita, came in 1984; Willcox did not get its own appellation until 2016. In between, a small number of growers in the high country of Cochise County figured out that the plain around Willcox, at 4,000-plus feet with volcanic soils and cold nights, could grow serious grapes. Carlson Creek, started by a family in 2008, was one of the estates that scaled that up; by 2017 wine writers on the Scottsdale circuit described it farming close to 300 acres and selling grapes to other wineries as well as making its own.
The problem was distance. Willcox is about three hours from Phoenix, and most people will not drive three hours to taste wine they have never heard of. The answer, from the 2010s on, was the urban tasting room. Producers including Carlson Creek, Aridus, LDV and Salvatore opened rooms within a few blocks of one another in Old Town, close enough to walk between, and the cluster became the Scottsdale Wine Trail.
Marshall Way was a natural address. The gallery street already had foot traffic on Thursday nights, a crowd that buys things it likes, and a tradition of small storefronts run by people who make what they sell. A wine room in a renovated gallery fits that history better than a bar would. It also changed the street’s evenings: where ArtWalk used to end when the galleries closed, it now ends at a tasting bar.
The honest assessment: Carlson Creek is not the most intimate room on the trail, and on a Saturday night it can feel like a party. But it is one of the most reliable, the wines are a fair picture of what Willcox does, and the space is generous enough that a first-timer can relax. For many visitors it is where Arizona wine stops being a joke.