Why I'll Always Be a Storyteller
By Patrick R. Dunn
The table in West Gardiner, Maine.
When I was a kid in Maine, the best hour of any night was the one after supper, when the adults stayed at the kitchen table and the kids were supposed to be somewhere else. They talked about farm life, about who in town was struggling and who was helping, about the war nobody in that generation ever quite finished having. They kept their voices low enough that I had to work at it, which of course meant I heard every word.
I didn't understand then why the same stories came around again and again, like a record somebody kept putting back on. I do now. They were keeping them alive. If nobody said it out loud this year, it wasn't going to be there next year.
That's the whole thing I've been doing ever since, in one form or another.
Learning from Sandy Ives
At the University of Maine I was lucky enough to study under Sandy Ives, a folklorist who spent his life recording people nobody else thought to record. Loggers, fiddlers, potato farmers, the men who ran the river drives. He wanted what people said about their own work, in their own words, before anybody had a chance to clean it up.
Under Sandy I worked on a project interviewing women who welded at Bath Iron Works during the Second World War. Those recordings are still at the Maine Folklife Center, and I'm told they're among the most listened to in the collection. That job taught me that a good interview is a form of leadership. It gives someone a voice, it honors what they actually said, and it preserves a dignity that gets lost the second you start paraphrasing.
It also taught me a method, and the method is what the winemaker interviews here are built on. Ask everyone the same questions. Ask them cold. Let the answer run past the point where it's useful to you. Never write down the thing you wished they'd said.
That's why the interviews on this page use a fixed set of questions rather than whatever seems clever that morning. A first-vintage winemaker working out of somebody else's crush pad gets asked what a fifty-harvest veteran gets asked, so that ten years from now the answers can be read side by side and mean something as a body of work.
The freshman who met Stephen King
My first year at UMaine, a visiting professor turned up to teach freshman English for a semester. His name was Stephen King. He was at the very beginning of what became one of the more remarkable careers in American letters, and he had no idea how big it was going to get. Neither did we.
He didn't just assign writing. He talked about technique. About how a story finds its reader. About the difference between words on a page and words that go on living in somebody after the page is turned. He critiqued our work directly and honestly, with the kind of encouragement a kid from West Gardiner doesn't forget.
I never became a novelist. But I never stopped thinking about the thing he kept coming back to, which is that the story isn't for you. It's for the person in the room who needs to hear it.
The sound of connection
Later I found another chapter of this at Le Club Calumet in Augusta. Saturday nights there were fiddle music, French-Canadian reel dancing, and the smell of tourtière coming out of the kitchen. Nobody in that hall was explaining anything to anybody. You didn't have to say a word. The music was the story.
That's when it landed for me that stories don't only come through words. They live in rhythm and movement and laughter, in a room full of people saying we're still here.
A wine made honestly does something close to that. It's a record of a place, a year, and a few hundred decisions somebody had to make under pressure, and it makes that record without a word of narration. Whether anybody ever hears the rest of it is a separate question, and usually the answer is no.
The parks taught me the rest
Before the corporate years, before any of the rest of it, I was a National Park Service interpretive ranger. Six sites over about ten years, telling the story of the ground to whoever came through the gate.
That job taught me something no classroom could. Every group was different. Some mornings I'd look out and the front row was seven-year-olds, eyes wide, fidgeting, about three minutes from being finished with me. So I learned to take a battle or a fault line or an object behind glass and put a child inside it, and to watch the moment a face turned from polite boredom into something real.
Other mornings the front row knew more about the subject than I did. Then the job wasn't to inform anybody. It was to hand them one detail they didn't already own, or one angle that reframed what they thought they had settled.
And some days I was tired and the last thing I wanted was to perform. The parks taught me that the visitor has no idea what you're carrying and it was never their problem. Somebody drove four hours to stand there. You welcome them anyway, and you find the story anyway.
Reading a room before you speak to it is the whole skill, and it turns out to be the same skill on the page. A piece written for people who already know everything is a different piece than one written for somebody holding their first glass of Grenache. Most wine writing picks one and quits thinking about it.
What I notice when I walk into a room
Thirty years of crisis work came after the parks, and it sharpened all of it, but the instinct never changed. I still walk into a tasting room or a hotel lobby and I'm not reading the menu first. I'm listening for the story.
Does this place know who it is? Does the person behind the counter know why this wine matters, why this building went up where it did, why somebody's grandfather planted those vines on that particular hillside? Can they make me feel, even for an hour, like I belong here?
Most can't. Not because they don't care. Because nobody ever helped them find it.
I've sat in a tasting room in Healdsburg where I was a member. The host sat us down, poured, read the label back to us, and said enjoy. No story, no background, no reason to care about what was in the glass beyond what it cost. We left the club that year and told our friends, though not in the way the winery was hoping.
I've also stood in a tasting room in Châteauneuf-du-Pape where the woman behind the counter knew every bottle in front of her. Not the tasting notes. The land, the families, the seasons that made each wine what it was. She talked to us like we were the only guests who had ever walked in.
Same industry, same format, and no meaningful difference in what was poured. The difference was the story.
Why the Pour Story Society
Every place has one. Every bottle has one. A history worth knowing, a reason somebody chose this land, built this room, and hung on through a year that tried to take it from them.
And a wine worth drinking does the same work that kitchen table did. You open something and you're somewhere else. A patio in August. A year that went badly and the people who got you through it. A restaurant that closed. Whoever was sitting across from you, if anybody was. Smell and taste get there before language does, so the memory arrives before you have any words for it, which is exactly how it worked in that kitchen, and it's the reason a bottle is worth more than what's in it.
Most of that never reaches the person drinking the wine. That gap between the story a place has and the story it tells is what I've spent a lifetime noticing, and it's what I've decided to spend this next stretch doing something about.
I write about wine for magazines and trade publications and I'll keep doing that. But a wine story doesn't always have somewhere to go. Some pieces get reported and checked against a specific pitch and then lose the slot, because the timing shifts or somebody ran something close to it six weeks earlier. Others were never going to fit a masthead in the first place. Too regional, too personal, too far from whatever an editorial calendar needs that month.
The Pour Story Society is where all of it runs. Wine stories. Tasting rooms and the people working them. The bar with the history nobody behind it can tell you. Oral histories with winemakers, recorded and transcribed the way Ives recorded loggers and fiddlers, with a set of questions that doesn't change from one subject to the next. A monthly column. And along the way, how-to pieces for anyone who wants to get more out of what they're drinking, since a fair amount of what passes for wine knowledge is there to make people feel behind. Everything here is reported and fact-checked to the caliber you would expect from Wine Enthusiast, Wine Spectator, or Food & Wine, whether it started as a pitch to one of them or was written for this page from the beginning. The photographs are always my own, taken where I was standing.
It's called a society because it isn't meant to be one person talking. There will be guest writers along the way, people who know things I don't and have been somewhere I haven't. It's for anyone who likes wine and likes stories, who has a bottle somewhere that isn't about the bottle at all, and who wants to hear somebody else's.
Vianarra comes from via, the journey, and narra, to tell. The consulting practice is one half of that. This page is the other half, and it's the half that started at a kitchen table in Maine with people who kept saying the same things out loud because that was the only way to keep them.
I've had a lot of titles over the years and most of them expired. That one hasn't. Whatever else is on the card, I'm a storyteller first, and I always will be.
Every pour has a story. This is where I keep mine.
A version of this first appeared in May 2026. It has been updated for the Pour Story Society, where the winemaker oral histories described here begin this fall.
Patrick R. Dunn is a wine and hospitality writer whose work has appeared in Edible Reno-Tahoe, Edible San Fernando Valley, and Senior ResQ Magazine, where he writes the recurring column "Wine 101." He holds a WSET Level 3 certification and trained in oral history and occupational folklore methodology under folklorist Edward "Sandy" Ives at the University of Maine. He lives in Sparks, Nevada.
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