A four-storey glass wine tower filled with bottles inside a Las Vegas restaurant
The four-storey wine tower at Aureole, Mandalay Bay, where wine angels on cables fetched the bottles. Photo: rickpilot_2000, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The Great Wine Lists of Las Vegas Casino Resorts

October 21, 2026

Thirty years ago, ordering wine in a Las Vegas casino usually meant choosing between red and white. Today the Strip has some of the deepest restaurant cellars in the United States, and Napa Cabernet is the backbone of almost all of them.

How Las Vegas learned to love wine

The turning point came in the late 1990s, when resort developers decided that celebrity chefs and serious wine programmes could draw high-spending guests as effectively as headline shows. Bellagio, which opened in 1998, set the tone with restaurants such as Picasso, where diners eat beneath original works by the artist, and a cellar built to match. Other resorts followed, recruiting chefs from New York, Paris and Lyon and hiring teams of sommeliers.

The most theatrical cellar of all was the four-storey glass wine tower at Aureole in Mandalay Bay, opened in 1999. Designed by Adam Tihany, it held thousands of bottles, and staff known as wine angels, harnessed to cables, flew up the tower to retrieve each order. Aureole closed in 2023, but the image of the flying sommelier remains part of Las Vegas folklore.

Bellagio hotel and casino lit up at night with the lights of Las Vegas behind it
Bellagio at night: the 1998 resort that helped turn the Strip into a serious wine destination. Photo: Clément Bardot, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The award winners

Wine Spectator's Restaurant Awards are the best-known measure of a wine list, and its highest tier, the Grand Award, goes to only a few dozen restaurants worldwide in a typical year. Over the years, Las Vegas restaurants that have held it include Picasso at Bellagio, Joël Robuchon at MGM Grand, Restaurant Guy Savoy at Caesars Palace, Delmonico Steakhouse at The Venetian and Aureole. Lists change and awards are reissued annually, so check the current year before you book, but few cities of its size have collected as many.

What is on a great casino list

  • Depth in Napa Cabernet. Steakhouse lists may offer dozens of vintages from the same producers, including mountain wines from Spring Mountain, Howell Mountain and Mount Veeder; see our Napa Cabernet guide.
  • First-growth Bordeaux and Burgundy. High-stakes guests from around the world expect the classics, often in large formats.
  • Verticals and rarities. Older vintages bought at auction, sometimes decades deep.
  • Big-format bottles. Magnums and larger for tables celebrating a win.

How to order well on the Strip

Casino restaurant markups can be steep, commonly two to three times retail or more. The best strategy is to talk to the sommelier. Point to a price on the list rather than naming a number aloud, say what you like, and ask what is drinking well right now. A sommelier would much rather sell you a mature, fairly priced wine that makes you happy than an expensive young bottle that tastes tight. Use a vintage chart as a rough guide, and remember that a less famous Napa mountain producer often gives better value than the trophy names.

Wine as part of the casino economy

For a casino resort, a great wine programme is more than a restaurant amenity. It helps attract the high-limit players whose action supports the whole property, and a rare bottle is one of the most prized comps a host can offer. We explain how that works in sommeliers, high-limit rooms and casino restaurants. And if your own taste runs from the blackjack table to the vineyard, our guide to a Napa to Reno and Lake Tahoe road trip joins the two in a single drive.