What is The Wine Collective of Scottsdale?
Old Town has half a dozen tasting rooms where one Arizona winery pours its own wines. The Wine Collective of Scottsdale is the one where somebody has tasted all of them and picked. It opened in April 2022 at 4020 N Scottsdale Rd, Suite 104, on the corner of 1st Avenue, in the building it shares with Daily Dose, and it is three things at once: a tasting room, a wine bar and a bottle shop, all devoted to Arizona wine.
The owner is Zoya Vora-Shah, a former wine representative who had owned My Wine Cellar in Ahwatukee and a sister bar in Gilbert, sold them, and then took a job behind the bar at Carlson Creek’s tasting room on Marshall Way. “I started tasting local wines at other tasting rooms and it inspired me,” she told PHOENIX magazine. “I was very impressed.” Her answer was a shop that would do the tasting for everyone else. At opening it stocked around 40 wines from 20 Arizona wineries, with a goal of 40 wineries, and kept an open bottle of every one so a customer could sample the whole shelf. The single out-of-state exception was Gruet, the New Mexico sparkling house.
The format is simple. Flights are four two-ounce pours on a theme, paired with nosh boards of artisan meats, cheeses and chocolates. Glasses started at $8 and most bottles in the $30s, retail, which is also what you pay to drink them here. There is a covered, pet-friendly patio, a mural of a Verde Valley vineyard on the wall, and a Meet the Winemaker series that brings a producer up from Willcox or Sonoita once a month.
Our honest verdict: the best single introduction to Arizona wine in the city, and the only Old Town wine room where the person pouring has no reason to steer you to one label. Our wine tasting room guide puts it first for a newcomer, and our list of every bar and club in Scottsdale files it under Arizona wine.
How to taste your way through the state in an hour
Start with a flight. The themes at opening were Gold Rush, Rosé All Day, Swing Both Ways and Just Trust Me, the last of which hands the choice to the wine concierge based on what you say you like. Flights ran $18 to $22, and the shop’s first summer cut them to $15 for anyone with an Arizona ID. A flight and a nosh board is a full hour; two flights is an afternoon.
Drink what the trail recommends. Experience Scottsdale’s 2026 Old Town Wine Trail makes this the fifth of six stops, after LDV, Salvatore, Los Milics and Carlson Creek and before Aridus, and its pick here is the Strive 2022 Mélange Blanc, a white of 65 percent Petit Manseng and 35 percent Sauvignon Blanc. It is the kind of bottle that explains why people who dismiss Arizona wine have usually not tried the whites.
Buy to go. This is the half of the business the other tasting rooms do not have. The retail shelves carry the same wines you tasted, from more than 30 producers, and the shop has run a no-corkage promotion that let you drink a retail bottle on site at shelf price. If you are building a case of Arizona wine for people back home, this is the one stop where it can all happen.
Come for the events. Meet the Winemaker nights are monthly and ticketed; the September 2022 edition with Jules Dixon of 1764 Vineyards in Pearce poured five wines for $25. The shop also runs complimentary-tasting nights and a Sensory Wine Tasting Experience, and in 2022 it kept a weekday happy hour. Hours have been noon to 8 or 9 with Mondays closed; confirm the week’s schedule on the site, because a small shop’s hours move.
Bring the dog, walk the trail. The covered patio is pet-friendly, which puts it on our Scottsdale with dogs list, and the location at Scottsdale Road and 1st Avenue is a three-minute walk from the Marshall Way rooms. Park once in the Old Town garages and do the trail on foot. The Fifth Avenue and downtown guide covers the blocks to the west.
A collective in a town of single-winery rooms
Old Town’s wine scene grew up one winery at a time. Over the last fifteen years, from the 2010s on, estates from the Verde Valley and Willcox opened satellite tasting rooms downtown to reach the tourists who would never drive to the vineyard: Carlson Creek on Marshall Way, LDV, Aridus, Salvatore, Los Milics, and the Verde Valley flagships Merkin Vineyards and Arizona Stronghold, both of which came and left within a few years. Each room pours one producer. That is good for the producer and limiting for the drinker, who has to walk six doors to compare a Willcox Syrah with a Sonoita one.
Vora-Shah’s idea, when she opened in 2022, was to put the comparison on one shelf. “There are so many excellent Arizona wines,” she said, but not everyone knows which to try. Her background made her the right person to choose: a wine rep’s palate, two shops of her own already built and sold, and a stint on the retail side of the Old Town trail. The pitch at opening, downtown’s only combined Arizona-wine tasting room and shop, was accurate and still is. She also made a point of staff training; every employee is expected to know every bottle, because, as she put it, “the proof is in the glass.”
The timing was good. Arizona had about 130 wineries when she opened, by her count, and the state’s wine had spent a decade shedding its novelty status. Experience Scottsdale’s decision to make the shop an official stop on its 2026 wine trail, and to list it among the city’s top ten places for wine, put a small independent room on the same map as the estate tasting rooms it sells.
Honest assessment: The Wine Collective is a shop first and a bar second, and if you want a long evening with a kitchen, the Marshall Way rooms or a full wine bar will serve you better. For what it is, a place to taste a state in an hour and carry the best of it home, there is nothing else like it in Scottsdale, and it is the stop we send first-timers to before any of the others.