What is Los Milics Vineyards?
Anyone who has eaten at FnB has met the argument. Pavle Milic, who co-founded that restaurant in 2009 with chef Charleen Badman, spent years building an all-Arizona wine list and talking skeptical diners into it one glass at a time. Los Milics Vineyards is the argument with his name on the bottle.
The winery is an estate in Elgin, in the grasslands of southeastern Arizona’s original wine country, founded in 2018. Milic and partner Mo Garfinkle are among the people behind it. The estate grows Spanish, French and Italian varieties and makes red, white and rosé, and in 2023 USA Today readers voted it one of the top three new winery experiences in the country. In 2024 it added a restaurant and nine casitas in Elgin.
The Scottsdale tasting room opened on February 22, 2024, as a small, dark bar at 4151 N Marshall Way, with a larger permanent room promised. That room is now open at 7045 E Third Avenue, Suite 101, around the corner. It pours Los Milics wines by the glass, the bottle and the flight, and it has something most Old Town tasting rooms do not: an open kitchen right behind the bar, where the staff pull fresh mozzarella and put out a menu built for grazing and lunch. There are two patios.
That kitchen changes what the place is for. Most tasting rooms are stops. This one is a destination for an afternoon.
Booking, ordering and the walk
Reserve if you want a table. Los Milics takes table reservations through Tock, and on winter weekends that is worth doing; the bar is the walk-in option. The room opens at 11 a.m. and runs into the evening, a little shorter on Sundays; third-party listings sometimes show it closed on Mondays, so check the winery’s own site before you go.
Order a flight, then eat. A flight is the right way to start, because the estate makes a range and the staff can walk you through which wines are estate-grown and which vintages are showing best. Then order from the kitchen: the hand-pulled mozzarella is the dish the room is built around, and a couple of shared plates turn the visit into lunch. Ask what is new from Elgin; small estates release in small lots.
Sit outside when you can. The two patios are the reason to come in spring and fall. In summer, the air-conditioned bar inside is the better seat.
Walk the cluster. From Third Avenue you are a minute from Marshall Way and the Carlson Creek room. Passion Cellars is a few blocks north at the Fifth Avenue horse fountain, and Salvatore Vineyards is beyond it on Stetson Drive. Thursday’s ArtWalk runs right past. For a full afternoon plan, the wine tasting guide lays out the route.
From a wine list to a winery
Old Town’s relationship with Arizona wine has a few landmarks. Kazimierz, the hidden wine cave on Stetson, taught a generation of Scottsdale to drink curiously before it closed in 2018. Merkin Vineyards, the Verde Valley winery’s Old Town room, was the loudest ambassador the state had until it closed in 2024. And FnB, in Craftsman Court since 2009, made the case that Arizona wine belonged on a serious restaurant’s list, all of it, with nothing from anywhere else.
Los Milics is what happened when one of those advocates went into production. Milic had spent more than a decade pouring other people’s Arizona wine; with partners, he planted his own in Elgin, close to where the state’s modern wine industry began in the Sonoita area in the 1980s. The estate came together quickly: founded in 2018, a national readers’ award in 2023, a restaurant and casitas by 2024. The Scottsdale room opened the same year, on the gallery street, as one more tasting room in a walkable cluster that already included Carlson Creek, Aridus, LDV and Salvatore.
The timing mattered. Merkin’s Old Town room closed in 2024, the same year Los Milics opened, and Old Town’s wine scene could have shrunk. Instead it changed hands. The new room’s open kitchen also answers something Merkin had shown: that Scottsdale visitors will treat a winery bar as a place to eat if the food is good, not just as a stop on a crawl.
The honest assessment: Los Milics is young, as Arizona wineries go, and the Scottsdale room is still finding its rhythm after its move from Marshall Way. But the wines come from people who have thought harder about Arizona wine than almost anyone, the mozzarella is a real reason to visit, and the room fills a gap Merkin left. For a reader of this guide, that makes it one of the essential stops on the trail.