Milliaire Winery Calaveras County | Murphys, CA

Milliaire Winery Wine Tasting Notes

On Main Street in downtown Murphy's in an old Flying A gas station building. A rather well-suited structure for a tasting room, actually.

The winery is owned by Liz and Steve Millier, (the winery name means "milestone" in french, and is pronounced the same as the family name), and Steve has made wine for most of the wineries in Murphys at some point, including Stevenot and Ironstone.

This is your intimate family winery experience, for sure. The sign on the tasting room says "by appointment", but we strolled in hoping to make an appointment for "now", and were greeted warmly by Terri and her dog Blondie. Nobody else was in the tasting room, and Terri managed to fit us in "now".

We discussed the free tasting and how they had to start charging a small fee for parties of six or more. It seems that in peek summer months the tasting room gets hit with large groups who rarely buy anything after the free tasting. Terri explains how they try to make it as intimate as possible, because they want to "enjoy the people who come in." So they do what they can.

At some point Stan enters with a sushi lunch for our host, Terri. We quickly learn that Stan is just back from vocal classes in Sonora. He proceeds to entertain us with a few acapella renditions of Willie Nelson songs before leaving to collect firewood. Stan is a wildly interesting guy. He looks like a farmer; I picture him wearing his worn cap in an old pickup truck in the field. He once worked in a carnival, and was also a NASA engineer. He and Terri met at the tasting room and seem to really enjoy each other.

As good of an experience as Milliaire was, we can't say we loved the wines. Most of the reds were a bit sweet for our palate. We scored them mostly in the mid eighties, all good... not great. The stand out was the 2006 Catherine's Cuvee Muscat. Nice orange color, with a light, clean nose and nice finish. All of the wines were very reasonably priced in the $15 - $25 range.

This is a perfect example of why we do this. It's the wine tasting experience that we're after, giving us the chance to try new wines. Milliaire is a wonderful wine tasting experience and should not be missed.

Milliaire Winery Wines