Wine Tasting At D.H. Lescombes Winery (Formerly St Clair Winery) In Deming, NM

There wasn’t a huge amount of stuff to do in Deming itself during our 10 days there, although the city did serve as a good home base for everything else we did in the area.

One claim to fame that Deming does have is that it’s home to New Mexico’s largest winery. Once known as St Clair Winery, it now goes by the name D.H. Lescombes Winery as it’s been owned by the Lescombes family for more than three decades.

They actually have several different locations in New Mexico. There’s the winery in Deming, but you can also visit D.H. Lescombes Winery & Bistro in Las Cruces and Albuquerque, along with Hervé Wine Bar in Santa Fe (Hervé Wine Bar is presumably named after Hervé Lescombes, founder of D.H. Lescombes Winery and father of its current owners – Emmanuel and Florent Lescombes).

I don’t know about the other locations, but D.H. Lescombes Winery in Deming is part of Harvest Hosts. If you’re not familiar with Harvest Hosts, it’s a program where you pay $99 per year and allows RVers to stay at more than 2,000 wineries, breweries, farms and more nationwide for free. There’s a stay limit of 24 hours per location, so it’s generally best used for overnight stays along a route. From what we understand based on chatting to RVers who participate in Harvest Hosts, there’s also an expectation (but not an actual obligation) that you’ll spend some kind of money at the place you’re staying seeing as they’re offering you a free place to stay overnight. That could be a wine tasting, a cheese plate, food from the farm, beer growler, etc.

One of the great things about Harvest Hosts is that by the nature of many of the hosts being farms, wineries, etc., you’ll often end up with some great views. There were a number of RVs in the parking lot at D.H. Lescombes Winery when we visited, but their parking lot is very large and so everyone had plenty of space and privacy with beautiful mountain views.

The entrance to the tasting room had fun door handles.

Wine tasting at D.H. Lescombes is good value, although I was a little confused by their pricing. You can get:

• Six 1 oz pours for $6 (excludes dessert and limited release wines)
• Three 2 oz pours for $9 (excludes dessert and limited release wines)
• Two 2 oz pours for $12 (can include dessert wines)

The pricing for the final option makes sense as it includes dessert wines which the first two options don’t include. With the first two tasting options though, you get exactly the same selection of wines to choose from and get a total of 6 oz with both of them, but the second option is 50% more expensive. Shae and I chose the first option not only because it was cheaper but because it also meant we got to try more of their wines.

I’m glad we went for the 6x 1 oz option because all their wines were very good and so we got to try more of them. I prefer red wine and so chose five reds and one bubbly.

Shae prefers red wine too, but she’s happy to try whites as well and so she got three reds, one rosé, one white and a bubbly.

In addition to having tasty wines, another great feature of the winery is that it’s pet-friendly. That meant Truffles was able to join us, although she was exhausted the first time we visited as that was after our day out in Truth or Consequences where she’d spent a lot of time playing on the beach at Elephant Butte Lake State Park.

We enjoyed our tasting so much that we returned for another tasting on Easter Sunday. With so many different wines available, we were able to try a bunch of different wines to before, all of which were delicious too.

The tasting room was quiet the first time we’d visited and so we’d been somewhat comfortable doing the tasting inside. When we returned the following week it was a little busier, so we decided to do our tasting outside as it was during COVID and we hadn’t been vaccinated yet.

Doing our wine tasting outside was hardly a hardship though because it was a beautiful afternoon and we had wonderful views with the mountains in the distance.

Shae ordered a cheese plate which also came with crackers, meat, olives, strawberries and chocolate. It was a decent spread and so I was pleasantly surprised at how cheap it was. I forget its exact cost, but it was less than $10 which was great value considering how much wineries often charge for cheese plates and how much food was on the plate.

Final Thoughts

It’s easy to see why D.H. Lescombes Winery (formerly St Clair Winery) in Deming is the largest winery in New Mexico. They have excellent wine, beautiful views, friendly staff and good value snacks to go along with your wine.

Their wine was so good that we ended up buying four bottles of wine to take with us. If you take the bottles to go rather than drink them on site they deduct $10 from the cost of each bottle which meant that all the bottles we got cost less than $20 each which was also a reasonable price.

We’ll be visiting Albuquerque again in October for the International Balloon Fiesta, so we might have to visit their winery and bistro while we’re up there so that we can get their wine again.

Address

D.H. Lescombes Winery & Tasting Room, 7075 Hwy 549 SE, Deming, NM 88030

n.b. If using Google Maps for directions, there’s a good chance that you’ll be taking exit 85 from I-10. As you head east along Hwy 549, the winery will be on your left, so keep an eye out for it as you’re driving down the road. For some reason Google Maps tried to direct us about five miles beyond the winery, only to U-turn and head back down the same road. Google Maps seems to not realize that there’s a gap in the median which means you can turn left into the winery.