Arizona wineries boost sales by giving customers something to chew on

"We had a full intention of having a tasting room that happened to serve food, but really, what happened is it just wound up being really a restaurant that happens to serve the wines we make," he said of Los Milićs Vineyards. "It's an interesting hybrid of both a restaurant and a tasting room."

Mark Beres said the 16-year-old Flying Leap Vineyards and Distillery in Elgin that he owns with partners Marc Moeller and Tom Kitchens has become secondary to the partners' recent foray into the Tucson restaurant industry.

"Flying Leap is primarily ... in the restaurant business now," Beres said of acquiring Vero Amore on North Swan Road and Noble Hops in Oro Valley last year from Jam Culinary Concepts. "The wine business is sort of an afterthought."

As the Arizona wine industry hobbles back from a disastrous few years that saw declining sales and a glut of unsold wine, wineries are finding that the best way to draw attention to what's in the bottle is to give consumers an excuse to pour.

Nationwide, millennials (ages 30-45) and Gen Z (ages 21-29) are the key drivers behind a push for more immersive wine experiences that can range from behind-the-scenes winery tours to elevated food and wine pairings, concerts on the vineyards and events that pair wine with an activity such as yoga or painting.

A few wineries in the Sonoita AVA  — Twisted Union Wine Co. at the former Keif-Joshua Vineyards and Los Milićs Vineyards both in Elgin, and Dos Cabezas WineWorks in Sonoita — have casitas and other overnight accommodations, positioning themselves as wine tourism destinations. 

Los Milićs also operates The Biscuit, a full-service restaurant at the Elgin winery. In January, he opened a second restaurant/tasting room at 98 E. Congress St. in the former Wig-o-Rama space that had been home to the short-lived lunch and breakfast restaurant The National. 

"The counterintuitive cool thing about Arizona is that it's always been this very hyper local grassroots sort of wine scene, and having a food venue where you're able to sell your wine is just this additional avenue where you don't so much have to worry just about selling wine from the tasting room," said Milić, who owns the winery with his partner, Mo Garfinkle. "You now have hopefully food that has enough of a hook."

Milić had been championing Arizona wines long before he started making his own. At his Scottsdale restaurant FnB, a collaboration with James Beard Award-winning chef-owner Charleen Badman that opened in late 2009, Milić curated a wine list solely of Arizona winemakers. At the time, most restaurants were focused on California and European vintages.

FnB's wine program helped put Arizona wines and the Sonoita and Willcox AVAs on the map and earned Milić a pair of James Beard nominations. 

Early next year, he plans to open a second Tucson area tasting room at Uptown, the 51-acre urban resort being developed at the former Foothills Mall on the northwest side. The location near West Ina Road and North La Cholla Boulevard will feature wine and an abbreviated menu that could include a mozzarella bar. 

Flying Leap also has plans in the next year to expand its restaurant footprint in Tucson, Beres said. 

The move into restaurants in spring 2025 was Flying Leap's post-pandemic pivot. It came as the winery, which has been in operation since 2010, found itself with a glut of wine and fruit that it couldn't sell. 

Flying Leap and wineries throughout Arizona and the country were riding high during the pandemic with record numbers of people signing up for their wine clubs and ordering by the case. Restaurants and bars were closed so consumers started drinking from home.

Flying Leap in 2022 had the biggest harvest in its history.

By the time Beres and his fellow winemakers were barreling that harvest, wine sales started to slump. The downward slide has hardly let up in the years since, which prompted Beres and his partners to consider their next move.

"That was when we made the decision that we were going to pivot, to what we didn't know at the time," he said.

Their first thought was to do something different within the wine space, like open more tasting rooms.

"But then we sat down and said, you know, it doesn't make much sense to pivot in the wine business, because the wine business is itself a sinking tide, right?" Beres said.

Flying Leap, which also produces a line of spirits, had for years been working with Jam Culinary Concepts on its beverage program, so when owner Suzanne Kaiser indicated she was ready to sell and retire, Beres and his partners crunched the numbers and considered the risks.

In the end, they realized there was no more risk involved in restaurants than there was in wine.

"Most of the risk was that we didn't know what we were doing," Beres said. "We just didn't know the restaurant business. Later on, though, we would find that we were very good at the restaurant business. ... In fact, all of the austerity measures that we had taken in the wine business prepped us perfectly for what we would encounter in the restaurant business."

Beres said the restaurants have actually propped up his wine and spirits business.

"We're still in the wine business. We still grow grapes. Lovingly tend our vineyards. We harvest our grapes," Beres said, noting that they aren't harvesting nearly what they used to. "But we definitely are making really good wine. Since we pivoted into the hospitality business, that's where the real money's at."