What is LDV Winery?
LDV Winery is the Old Town outpost of a small estate winery in the far southeastern corner of Arizona. Its tasting room is at 7134 E Stetson Dr, #B110, in the Southbridge block on the south bank of the Arizona Canal, with a patio on the walkway that leads to the canal bridge and the Waterfront. Our wine tasting guide calls it the best first stop for someone who thinks they don’t like Arizona wine, and it is still the room we would send a skeptic to.
The name is a family story. Peggy Fiandaca and Curt Dunham spent their careers as community and strategic planners and collected wine on the side; the L and D stand for their family names, Lawrence and Dunham, and the V for the vineyard. They found the land they wanted in the foothills of the Chiricahua Mountains near Pearce, in the Willcox AVA: about 5,000 feet up, with 10,000-foot peaks behind it, volcanic soils from the ancient Turkey Creek Caldera, the Willcox Playa aquifer below and Ash Creek running through the property’s 40 acres. Dunham is the winemaker; Fiandaca runs the brand.
Everything poured here is estate grown, and the focus is Rhône varieties: viognier, grenache, rosé of grenache, syrah and petite sirah. That makes LDV a single-vineyard lesson in what high-desert Willcox does with the grapes Arizona has bet on, poured a three-hour drive from the vines.
The room has two patios and an expanded indoor bar, with tables inside for the summer and seats outside for everything else.
How to spend an hour here
Sit down and let them bring it. Since the 2021 reopening, tasting at LDV has been table service: pick a flight, take a table, and the staff bring the pours and talk you through them. Wines rotate through the flights, so ask what is new. Glasses and bottles are poured too, and there are cheese plates and snacks if the hour turns into two.
Time it right. The room opens at noon every day and stays open until 8 p.m. Monday through Thursday, 9 p.m. Friday and Saturday and 6 p.m. Sunday. Happy hour, Monday through Thursday from 3 to 6 p.m., takes money off select glasses. No reservations are needed for a tasting, but groups larger than six must book ahead, pay on one ticket and expect a 20 percent gratuity.
Book something special. LDV runs specialty tastings by advance reservation, including a tasting with the winemaker, wine and cheese pairings and Le Nez du Vin, its aroma-training session. The room and patios can also be rented for showers, bachelorette parties and corporate events; our bachelorette weekend note has the rest of that itinerary.
Park underneath. The building has underground parking, there is some street parking on Stetson, and on weekends attendants out front will park your car for a small fee.
Use the block. Barrio Queen and Marcellino Ristorante are the dinners a few doors west at 7114 E Stetson, and The Ends is across the street. Salvatore Vineyards is a short walk down Stetson for an Italian-leaning comparison, and Carlson Creek is a short walk south on Marshall Way. Cross the canal on foot afterward for the Waterfront at sunset, or, in season, Canal Convergence.
From First Street to the canal bank
LDV was established in 2008, part of the generation of growers who made Willcox, recognized as its own appellation in 2016, the source of most of Arizona’s wine grapes. Fiandaca and Dunham chose their site the way planners would, with a list: altitude enough for a 30-degree swing between day and night, a mountain to shape the microclimate, reliable water, good drainage for air and monsoon rain, volcanic soil, and ground that had not been farmed commercially for a hundred years. The winery’s logo, three circles, honors the Native American farmers who grew corn and squash along Ash Creek before them.
Like most Arizona wineries, LDV had a distance problem: the vineyard is several hours from the people who buy wine. The answer, in Old Town in the 2010s, was the urban tasting room. In late 2014 the couple opened the Lawrence Dunham Vineyards Wine Gallery at 6951 E 1st St, in the arts district south of Indian School, a well-lit room where art and wine shared the walls and the tasting bar stood on a rock-and-iron pedestal. By 2017 it was one of five rooms on what was being sold as the Scottsdale Wine Trail, alongside rooms including Carlson Creek, Aridus and the Domanico family’s room on Fifth Avenue.
The First Street room was charming but, as one wine writer put it, a bit out of the way. LDV’s answer was Stetson Drive. On April 1, 2021, the tasting room reopened at 7134 E Stetson Dr, remodeled, with indoor and patio seating and a new table-service flight program, in the Southbridge block that Cowboy Ciao and Kazimierz had made Old Town’s wine street. STK had opened in the same building that January. The move put LDV on the canal walkway between the shopping streets and the Waterfront, and it outlasted Merkin Vineyards, the Verde Valley room across Stetson that closed in 2024.
The honest assessment: LDV is not a scene and does not try to be. It is a calm, well-run room pouring one estate’s wines, and the wines are good enough to make the case for Arizona on their own. In 2026 it is still pouring, still hosting events and still where you buy the bottles.