Los Milics Vineyards

From the parking area a path runs out through the vines toward a row of steel plates. They stand about twenty feet tall, weathered to a dark bronze, and form a cone that narrows at one end and opens at the other toward the Mustang Mountains. Arizona Highways likened them to a modern-day Stonehenge. The owners call them an “art installation.” The gaps between the plates show slices of grassland and mountain but not the building. A visitor sees the tasting room of Los Milics Vineyards only on reaching the narrow courtyard at the wide end, where it sits as a glass box among the steel.

The country around it is the rolling grassland of southern Arizona wine country at about 5,000 feet, 45 minutes south of Tucson. The Whetstone Mountains stand in the distance. Closer in is the northernmost peak of the Mustangs, Mount Bruce, which locals call the Biscuit for its softly rounded summit. Writing for the October 2025 issue of Arizona Highways, Nikki Buchanan noted that there “isn’t a telephone pole in sight” and that the quiet is broken only by birdsong or wind through the vines. Pavle Milić, the winemaker and co-owner, has described the drive up from the interstate this way: “The road is a winding, undulating two-lane highway redolent of a time past, with scattered ranches and native ocotillos pointing toward the eternal expanse of our Arizona skies.”

Steel on an old cattle range

The vineyard’s twenty acres were once part of a cattle-grazing operation. In 2018, according to Phoenix Home & Garden, two couples bought the land: Ita and Pavle Milic, and Stephanie and Mo Garfinkle. A prefab steel production building went up first. For the tasting room they went to Thamarit “Tommy” Suchart and Patricia Szu-Ping Chen Suchart, a husband-and-wife firm in Scottsdale, Chen + Suchart Studio. The Sucharts had been regular dinner guests at Pavle’s Scottsdale restaurant, FnB. “I never really knew what the two of them did for a living,” Pavle recalled. One night they asked his advice on a hospitality project, and he looked up their work.

“We did a few first sketches,” Patricia said, “but we decided that those initial ideas looked too much like a building.” Tommy described the goal as “something that was not a building but rather a sculpture that happens to be a tasting room.” The walk from the car through the vineyard was laid out so that visitors take in the land before they understand the structure. “We deliberately choreographed the views,” he said.

Inside are 3,400 square feet: a long bar, open floor, glass-walled nooks that jut into the vineyard, a private tasting room, and a kitchen. The interior repeats the weathered steel in dark tones, warmed with walnut. A ground-concrete floor runs out through a 40-foot telescoping glass wall to a covered patio aimed at the Biscuit. Mills Design Group of Sonoita built it. Phoenix Home & Garden reported it completed in 2022, and the Patagonia Regional Times gives 2022 as the year the tasting room opened.

Lunch, dinner and the Biscuit

By day the room pours flights of five wines, along with wine by the glass and the bottle. Executive chef Trevor Routman sends out tapas-style shared plates made with ingredients from local farms and ranches. Children come with their parents, and dogs are allowed in the tasting room and on the patio. On weekends there is brunch. For a private tour, the Winemaker Library Walk begins with a walk through the vines and grounds the tasting in that year’s growing season.

In the evening the same room becomes a restaurant called The Biscuit, after the peak framed in its floor-to-ceiling windows. It serves a seasonal full menu and a lighter bistro menu, with seatings from 5:30 to 7:30. Buchanan called the food modern American and singled out “a spectacularly good bread course.”

The wines carry first names. A Visit Arizona profile lists Ita’s Rosé, Hannah’s White, Renato’s Tempranillo Blend, Lorenzo’s Tempranillo, Oliver’s Syrah Blend, Stephanie’s Monastrell, Mo’s Graciano and Betty’s Grenache. The rosé has done the best in competition. In March 2024 Los Milics swept the Arizona Governor’s Cup, taking Best White, Best Rosé and Best in Show. At the 2025 azcentral Arizona Wine Competition, Ita’s 2024, a light rosé of grenache, tempranillo and vermentino, won a Growers Cup as best rosé. Pavle told the Patagonia Regional Times that he celebrates an award “for like five minutes and then put it away and forget about it, because I also know how hard it is to do this.”

Nine houses that rust

In 2024 the Milics opened nine casitas a short walk from the tasting room. Buchanan reported that each looks out over 12 acres of planted vines. The Sucharts designed them as well. Their corrugated metal skins are meant to rust and take on a patina the color of the ground. Each is a one-bedroom house with a galley kitchenette that has a wine fridge but no stove, a bath with a walk-in shower, a dining area, and a workspace whose cupboard hides a Murphy bed. In the living room a king bed comes down from the ceiling at the touch of a button. Each house has a covered patio facing Mount Bruce. Guests make their own breakfast from the fruit, cereal, granola, milk, yogurt and fresh-baked muffins left for them.

Seventeen grapes at five thousand feet

The winery grows seventeen varieties. Some are well known, such as Syrah and Tempranillo. Others are less familiar, such as Vranac, a Montenegrin red whose name the winery translates as “Black Stallion,” and Montepulciano. The winery says the wide swing between day and night temperatures at this elevation helps the grapes keep their acidity, and the sun ripens them. The Montepulciano went in during 2019 and, by the winery’s account, “took to the land” from the start. The Teroldego vines grow tall. Some Grenache blocks are set aside for rosé and picked early for acidity, then aged in 500-liter puncheons and a concrete egg.

The Elgin vines are only part of the farm. There is a second vineyard in Elfrida, about an hour east. The accounts of the total acreage do not agree. An early Visit Arizona profile gave 12 planted acres at Elgin and 13.5 at Elfrida. The Patagonia Regional Times put the two vineyards at some 50 acres in April 2025. Pavle’s own site says the estate now farms over 70 acres.

The Elfrida vineyard brought national notice. In August 2024 a Food & Wine writer and photographer came to a night harvest there, and the visit was kept quiet for nearly a year. In September 2025 the magazine made Los Milics the featured vineyard of its Harvest Issue. Pavle said he believed it was the first time the magazine had chosen an Arizona vineyard for that issue. “It’s amazing to hear Arizona wine described as ‘world class,’” he said.

The cellar is run by both Milics, with Oswaldo Medina as assistant winemaker. Medina grew up in Morelia, Michoacán, studied viticulture and enology at Fresno State, and spent nearly ten years as assistant winemaker at Hunt Cellars in California before coming to Los Milics.

“How much does a barrel cost?”

Pavle Milić was born to a Colombian mother and a Yugoslavian father. He started in restaurants at 15 and first stepped into a dining room in June 1988. Front-of-house work took him to Arcadia in New York and then to four years at Restaurant & Bar Angele in Napa Valley. In late 2009, in Old Scottsdale, he and chef Charleen Badman opened FnB. Its wine list was among the first in the country to carry only Arizona wines, and that list made him friends with Todd and Kelly Bostock of Dos Cabezas Wineworks.

He told the Patagonia Regional Times what came next. “I remember Todd came in one day to have lunch, and I don’t know why I couldn’t just come out of the closet and say, ‘Hey, I want to learn how to make wine. Can you teach me?’ So the only thing that came out of my mouth was, ‘Hey, how much does a barrel cost?’” Bostock understood. Under their arrangement, Pavle could make a private label without paying for it himself, in exchange for working alongside Bostock “from pruning all the way up to the bottling.” In 2014 the label Los Milics was released, made with the Bostocks. Its first vintage was Oliver’s.

Ita Milic learned in the same cellars. She was born in Villa Alemana, in Chile’s fifth region, and earned a degree as a medical technician in Valparaíso. She came to the United States after meeting Pavle and worked in Arizona restaurants. She also spent a harvest with the Villard family in Chile. The winery’s team page says she took courses through UC Davis, while the Visit Arizona profile names the University of Sacramento. That profile adds that most of her training came hands-on with the Bostocks at harvest, and that she credits Kent and Lisa Callaghan of Callaghan Vineyards for guidance.

The vineyard itself began at an FnB table. Visit Arizona tells it this way: Pavle poured Los Milics for two customers, the Garfinkles, and they asked almost at once to become partners in a winery. Mo Garfinkle was a former aviation consultant who had been on the team that created the Star Alliance, and he had searched the world for a winery to buy. Pavle’s account and Phoenix Home & Garden date the founding to 2018. Visit Arizona says the partnership was established in 2019, and the Patagonia Regional Times says the Milics established the Elgin vineyard that year.

In those first seasons, before the steel went up, the Milics poured on the winery’s crush pad Thursday through Sunday, with renderings of a future tasting room on display inside. Ita has compared the vineyard work to raising children: “It’s like you plant it, you see them grow. And then you have issues. And then you come back again, and ‘Oh, I love you.’ Then you see how this vine grows. You put your hands on them, and you see them growing. It’s very beautiful. That for me is the romantic part. Then you work hard, and it’s not that romantic.”