Who Tells the Story While the Owner Is in the Cellar
Harvest pulls the winemaker out of the tasting room for six weeks. The story they normally carry does not follow them back.
For six weeks in the fall, the person who knows the winery's story best is standing on a crush pad with a hose in hand. The tasting room stays open and the tours keep running, but the story goes thin.
Staff do not forget the story during harvest. They lose access to the person who kept it current. The owner or the winemaker is the source, and when the source is unavailable what is left in the room is last spring's version, repeated with less conviction each week. Guests hear it. So do club members deciding whether to renew.
The practical step is to name a replacement source before the owner becomes unreachable. Three things make that work, and all three can be set up in an afternoon before the first fruit comes in.
Record the stories before crush starts
Sit the owner down for twenty minutes and ask for the two or three stories they tell without thinking about it. The one about the block that should never have been planted. The one about the first vintage and what went wrong in it. Record it on a phone. Nobody needs a transcript. What the tasting room team needs is to hear the owner say it in the owner's own words, and to have it available in October without having to interrupt anyone to get it.
Give one person the current vintage
Guests ask what is happening in the cellar right now, and during harvest they get four different answers from four people, most of them a week old. Assign one member of the tasting room team to be the person who knows. That person checks in with the cellar once a week, gets the actual facts, and passes them to everyone else before the weekend. It is a ten-minute job and it removes the guessing.
Write down what is true this week
A single page, updated Mondays. What came in, from which block, what is fermenting, what is about to be pressed. Specific enough that a guest hears something real instead of a wave toward the barrel room and the word busy. Staff will use it because it makes their job easier, which is the only reason any internal document ever gets used.
The whole thing costs the owner about half an hour a week, most of it spent before harvest even starts.
Common questions
How long should a harvest story recording be?
Twenty minutes of audio is plenty. It is reference material for staff, not content for publication, so it does not need editing, structure, or a second take.
What if the winery is too small to assign a vintage contact?
Small teams need it more, not less. At a two-person tasting room the role takes about ten minutes a week and can rotate. The point is that one person owns the check-in, so guests stop getting four versions of the same answer.
Work on this with your team
The Hospitality Storytelling Workshops focus on exactly this: what the team says when the owner is not in the room. Half an hour to talk through whether it fits the property.
Sources: drawn from Patrick R. Dunn's work with winery tasting room teams, and from interpretive method developed in the field with the National Park Service.
Patrick R. Dunn spent more than a decade as a National Park Service interpretive ranger at six sites and thirty years leading global crisis management and operational resilience teams across four continents, through 9/11, Katrina, and Sandy. He now runs Vianarra, a hospitality storytelling consultancy working with wineries, hotels, and restaurants. WSET Level 3 certified. Author of Stop Leading on Empty.