Greg La Follette came onto the Zoom call on a Monday morning in October and spent the first minute moving his camera around until a houseplant was mostly out of the frame. He told me he was doing not bad for an old guy. For the next hour he told stories, and somewhere in the middle of them was the 2005 harvest, when the rain brought everything in at once and his sorting crew was his wife and their six children, the youngest of them four, working a table they had built themselves out of scrap steel from the tops of old dairy tanks. Then I asked him the last of my twenty questions, the one every winemaker in the series gets. One pour, one stranger. Which wine, and what do you say before they taste it?
He picked the DeLoach 30th Anniversary Pinot Noir from 2004, his first year at DeLoach, and he did not describe it. He told me about the vines out front instead, old ones that had been left alone so long the berries came in tiny, and how he had wanted to give them one or two more waterings to get them across the finish line. The vineyard manager pulled out the irrigation lines without telling him. Greg asked him to put them back, the manager said no, and Greg went over his head to the owners, who made him do it. That wine became the 30th Anniversary Cuvée, and Wine Enthusiast named it the number one wine in its Top 100 for 2006. When I asked what he would say to the stranger before the first sip, the story of the irrigation lines was the answer.
My own wine education started with white Zinfandel in college, so I am in no position to look down on anybody's first glass. A few weeks ago I sat down at a small tasting room and ordered a flight. The host brought the glasses out and set them down in front of me, and as each one touched the table the host said the name of the grape in it, and that was all. Everything else was already printed on the tasting menu at my elbow, the vintage and the oak and the tasting notes, a short paragraph under each wine. It took less than a minute, and then the host was back behind the counter. I drank the wines, and I read the menu, and there was nothing on it I would have repeated to anyone on the drive home.
In 1957 Freeman Tilden wrote a small book called Interpreting Our Heritage for the people whose job is explaining a place to strangers, and in it he drew a line between information and interpretation. Information was the raw material. Interpretation, he wrote, is revelation based on it, and the facts on a tasting menu only become worth remembering once somebody uses them to show a stranger something.
I went back through the interviews this week to see how the winemakers handled question twenty, and none of them started with the menu.
Joel Peterson took the question from the East Coast a few weeks after his fifty-fourth harvest, on a call he had opened by asking how my morning was going before I could finish introducing myself. He chose the 1986 Old Hill Ranch Zinfandel, and the first thing he told me about it was when the vines went in. They were planted around 1885, among the first vineyards put back in the ground after phylloxera tore through California, a field blend of mostly Zinfandel with twenty other varieties mixed through the rows, dry-farmed and cropping about half a ton an acre in those years. He got to the wine itself eventually, rambunctious and dark when it was young and beautiful now, but the sentence he would speak to the stranger was this one: "Please enjoy this gem of California history and winemaking." A guest who could not pick a field blend out of a lineup still knows what it means for something to have lasted more than 140 years, and Joel started there.
Ivo Jeramaz had just finished his forty-first harvest at Grgich Hills, and he passed over the Cabernet and the Chardonnay the winery is known for. He chose a Sauvignon Blanc from a five-acre block in Carneros, vines more than thirty years old, a wine he had to ask his uncle, Mike Grgich, for permission to make. He named it Essence and allowed that the name might be a little pretentious. His reason for picking it had nothing to do with grapefruit. A great Sauvignon Blanc, he told me, is always a sign of great farming and a great site, and he is a farmer first. This is the same man who keeps a small notebook every vintage with a sentence or two about the weather and what got done that day, and who says he can find the pH of a 1993 lot in three seconds while the fellow with the computer is still looking. When he hands a stranger that Sauvignon Blanc, he is handing over the farming.
Mark Henry never got the questions on a call at all. We sat on his patio in Chicago Park on a Saturday afternoon late in October, with the vines on the slope below the house going yellow at the edges and no recorder on the table, and he covered nearly all twenty without my asking them. The things he wanted a stranger to know came out sideways, the way the best stories at a table usually do. His labels say Chicago Park in big type on purpose, and Sierra Foothills goes on the back. His Sinistra, two-thirds Teroldego and one-third Barbera, is named for left because he is left-handed. Due Baci started as the wine he made for his own wedding, and the guests liked it enough that it never came off the list. One of his tanks is named Don't Screw It Up. None of that takes more than ten seconds to say over a pour, and every bit of it is something a guest would tell a friend.
The hosts I watch at those counters are mostly doing what they were handed. The winery gives them a tech sheet, the tech sheet has the variety, the vintage, the oak and the fruit on it, and on a busy Saturday that sheet is what there is time for. The stories are real and usually better than anything on the sheet, and they tend to stay with the person who made the wine, a few hundred feet from the room where it gets poured. Greg's irrigation lines have lived in his memory for more than twenty years. I would guess very few people who have tasted that Pinot ever heard about them.
I keep coming back to the sentence Joel chose for his stranger. It is nine words long, and it would have fit easily between the glass and the menu at that table a few weeks ago. Please enjoy this gem of California history and winemaking.
Sources and notes. All quotes and answers come from the published Meet the Winemakers interviews: Joel Peterson, Once & Future Wine, recorded October 20, 2026; Greg La Follette, Marchelle Wines, recorded October 19, 2026; Ivo Jeramaz, Grgich Hills Estate, recorded October 14, 2026; and Mark Henry, Montoliva Vineyard & Winery, from a conversation at the winery on October 24, 2026. Freeman Tilden, Interpreting Our Heritage (University of North Carolina Press, 1957). The tasting room visit described here is my own, and the winery is not named.
Patrick R. Dunn writes Vianarra and works with wineries on how their teams tell their story to guests. He spent thirty years leading global crisis management and operational resilience teams across four continents, through 9/11, Katrina, and Sandy, and more than a decade as a National Park Service interpretive ranger at six sites. He trained in narrative at the University of Maine under Stephen King and folklorist Sandy Ives, holds WSET Level 3, and is the author of Stop Leading on Empty. Get Vianarra in your inbox every Wednesday at newsletter.vianarra.com.