Just deserts? The American Express, PGA West, January 18-21, 2024

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Maybe it’s the desert, but everything about wine in Palm Springs can be summed up by the first retailer I checked out, appropriately named Mirage. It was highly rated on google and had absolutely nothing in inventory I wanted to drink.

What’s going on here? I have no idea. I kept reading about great wine lists but could barely find anything online, and when I did, it was generally disappointing.

The one exception is Spencer’s Restaurant, which boasts a genuinely outstanding list. But in keeping with the general Palm Springs weirdness, there are no prices on the list, and you are encouraged “to contact the restaurant directly for current pricing.”

Zin American Bistro claims to have more than 550 wines but only shows wine list fragments, which generally seem promising. For example, the handful of mature Burgundies from “Mindy’s Private Cellar” were especially noteworthy and not at all over-priced. I don’t understand why they don’t just post the whole thing.

The La Quinta CliffHouse list, if not particularly large, has at least a few semi-inspired options.  But you’ll quickly understand what you’re in for when you see they lump all international reds in one small, unstructured section. Not really going to quicken the pulse but compared to alternatives at least it has one.  

Given our golf and wine context here on swigcoach.com, I’m glad to be able say that Arnold Palmer’s mostly American list is ok, even if it leans a little too heavily on popular names at the expense of excitement, most unlike an Arnie charge.  

For additional local color I refer you to this 2019 article from Palm Springs Magazine that identified the best wine lists in town. https://www.palmspringslife.com/wine-list-palm-springs-restaurants/. They must know more than I do, or at least they had the time to get under the covers. They recommend Wally’s Desert Turtle (?), which somehow evokes a particularly macabre scene from Breaking Bad, Mastro’s Palm Desert (a large steak chain with apparent local flexibility when it comes to wine), Morgan’s in the Desert (at La Quinta itself), and the Edge Steakhouse. Only Wally’s has an online list, which is honestly ok but not great. The article appears to suggest that there may be more than meets the eye to all of these places if you have the energy to look deeper.

Back to retail for a moment. There’s a great little natural/organic wine store in downtown Palm Springs called hyphen- . We know the owner, John Libonati, who is ex- of Chambers Street Wine in NYC and studied at the Culinary Institute of America (the other CIA). He’s a terrific guy who knows his stuff and has a real commitment to service as you can see in my google review here. If you like the genre, this place “gets you”. Another outstanding small shop at the other end of the Valley near La Quinta is Desert Wine Shop, presided over by Katie Finn, a certified sommelier and wine educator. The aperture is a little broader than hyphen-’s fierce commitment to organics, but the level of curation is also very high. Write me if you want the details, but Katie bailed me out of an unbelievable jam involving my daughter’s wedding, so I’m a huge fan. Among the more traditional wine store formats, Bouschet looks like the tallest cactus in a desert bonsai garden.