Patrick R. Dunn
Founder of Vianarra, a hospitality storytelling practice for wineries, hotels, restaurants, and the food and travel businesses around them.
It started with a group of strangers and forty seconds
An interpretive ranger learns early that most of the work happens in the forty seconds before the talk starts, while you read the people standing in front of you and work out what they came for. A family with tired children needs a different walk than four retired geologists do on the same trail, and the ranger who runs one script for both of them loses the room by the second stop.
I did that for more than a decade across six National Park Service sites, and it is still the thing I teach.
A tasting room at four o'clock on a Saturday is a group of strangers and forty seconds, and so is a hotel lobby at check-in or a dining room on a Friday night. Most staff get handed a script and very little help reading the people in front of them.
Before the parks, I studied narrative at the University of Maine, where a story was treated as work held to a standard. I took fiction with Stephen King and folklore with Edward “Sandy” Ives, who became a mentor, and it was there that I first read Freeman Tilden on interpreting a place for the people who come to see it.
Thirty years of holding a standard under pressure
Between the parks and the wine came three decades running global business continuity and operational resilience teams for Broadridge, One Call, Donyati, NNIT and Gilead Sciences, and Cognizant, in crisis rooms across four continents through 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, and Hurricane Sandy.
The work was unglamorous and specific, much of it triage and redundancy planning, and the hardest part was the 3 a.m. decision made with incomplete information and no way to take it back. It taught me what happens to a standard when the pressure comes on, and which parts of a system quietly stop working when nobody is watching.
A full tasting room or a sold-out holiday weekend at a hotel is a smaller version of the same problem. A standard that looks fine on a quiet Tuesday gets tested at four o'clock on a Saturday in October, and that is the hour I want to see.
Wine and service
WSET Level 3 certified. Disney Institute, Disney's Approach to Quality Service.
Parks
More than a decade as a National Park Service interpretive ranger across six sites.
Crisis
Thirty years leading global crisis management and operational resilience through 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, and Hurricane Sandy.
Narrative
Training under Stephen King and Sandy Ives at the University of Maine. Author of Stop Leading on Empty.
Three-time NCAA Division I All-American. First-generation college graduate from West Gardiner, Maine. Son of a WWII veteran who survived the Battle of the Bulge as a prisoner of war. Lifetime Rotarian and Paul Harris Fellow. Reno + Sparks Chamber member. Based in Sparks, Nevada.
What I do now
Vianarra is the practice I built out of all of that. I work with wineries, hotels, restaurants, and the food and travel businesses around them on finding the story of their place and telling it to the guest in front of them. Staff Workshops teach a property's hosts to do that across the tasting room, the front desk, or the table, and Story Desk carries the same story through the property's own newsletters, club letters, and social channels.
I also offer private and corporate wine tastings in Reno-Tahoe, in person elsewhere for corporate groups, and online, along with wine country itineraries planned through Pour Story Society. I sell no wine and I am not affiliated with any winery, so the bottles are chosen for the room and nothing else.
The writing
Most weeks I am writing for two newsletters. The Vianarra newsletter goes out on Wednesdays to the people who run tasting rooms, hotels, and restaurants, and Pour Story Society goes out every other Friday to people who love wine and a good story about where it came from. I write a Wine 101 column for Senior ResQ Magazine and features for Edible Reno-Tahoe and Edible San Fernando Valley, and I am a member of the International Food, Wine & Travel Writers Association and the North American Travel Journalists Association.
I am also recording Meet the Winemakers, an oral history of winemakers around the world, well known and not, built on the fieldwork method Sandy Ives taught me in Orono. Each interview is published as a transcript with my summary, after the winemaker has reviewed it.
Speaking
Conference sessions and association programs on hospitality storytelling, interpretation, and what holds up under pressure, for hospitality and wine trade conferences, tourism bureaus, hospitality associations, and parks and recreation. This fall I am also a guest lecturer in the Hospitality & Tourism Management program at Truckee Meadows Community College.
Reading the Room Before You Speak to It
The interpretive method taken out of the parks and put in front of a hospitality audience. How to read a group before speaking to it, when to step in, when to leave a table alone, and why a memorized script tends to fail exactly when the room gets busy. The room itself is the working example.
Who Rescues the Rescuer
Thirty years of crisis work, and what happens to the people who run toward it. Drawn from Stop Leading on Empty. Booked for the Missouri Park & Recreation Association’s 2027 Conference & Expo, February 16 to 19, 2027, in Osage Beach.
Both adapt to a program's theme, with half-day and full-day formats where a program wants members working rather than listening. Fee depends on format, audience, and travel. Travel is reimbursed, and a signed agreement is standard.
Stop Leading on Empty
Stop Leading on Empty was published by Archway, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, in April 2026. It is a book about leading when the energy is gone and the expectations have not moved, drawn from the crisis years.
Pour Story is in development.
Start with a conversation
Fifteen minutes on your property's story and where the gap seems to be.
patrick@vianarra.com
+1 (775) 241-3690