About Patrick R. Dunn

Founder of Vianarra, a hospitality storytelling practice for wineries, boutique hotels, and independent restaurants.

It started with a group of strangers and forty seconds

An interpretive ranger learns early that the talk is not the job. The job is the forty seconds before it, when 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. Same trail, same rock, different story, and the ranger who runs the same script either way loses the room by the second stop.

Patrick R. Dunn did that for more than a decade across six National Park Service sites. It is still the thing he teaches. A tasting room at four o’clock on a Saturday is a group of strangers and forty seconds, and most staff are handed a script instead of a way to read the room.

The craft came before the uniform. He trained in narrative at the University of Maine under Stephen King and the folklorist Edward “Sandy” Ives, where a story was treated as work with standards rather than a marketing device.

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 Gilead Sciences, SunGard, Capgemini, and Broadridge. Crisis rooms across four continents, through 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, and Hurricane Sandy.

The work was unglamorous and specific. Triage. Redundancy. The 3 a.m. decision made with incomplete information and no room to take it back. What that teaches is not resilience as a slogan. It is what happens to a standard when the pressure comes on, and which parts of a system quietly stop working when nobody is watching.

A busy tasting room is a smaller version of the same problem. The standard holds on a quiet Tuesday. The question is whether it holds at four o’clock on a Saturday in October.

Every place has a Vianarra. Not every place knows how to tell it.

The name comes from the Latin via, journey, and narra, to tell. The story found along the way.

Vianarra works with winery owners, tasting room managers, hoteliers, innkeepers, and restaurateurs across Sonoma County, Napa Valley, Amador County, and the Reno-Tahoe corridor. The premise is that most properties already have the story. It sits in the soil, the family, the building, the way the light comes through the room at the end of the day. What is missing is a way for the person pouring at the bar to carry it.

When a front-of-house team cannot speak to terroir, heritage, and the identity of the place, the loss shows up quietly. Club conversions slip. Guests visit once and remember nothing worth repeating. Nobody can point to the moment it went wrong, because there wasn’t one.

The work runs through guest experience audits, staff storytelling workshops, and a twelve-month brand narrative program.

The short version

WSET Level 3 certified. Former National Park Service interpretive ranger across six sites. Thirty years leading global operational resilience through 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, and Hurricane Sandy. Narrative training under Stephen King and Sandy Ives at the University of Maine. 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. Based in Sparks, Nevada.

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 rather than from theory.

The Story in the Glass, on the architecture of hospitality storytelling, is in development.

Patrick speaks occasionally on hospitality and leadership. Inquiries through the contact page.

Start with a conversation

Thirty minutes on your property’s story and where the gap seems to be. Most engagements begin with a guest experience audit, since it grounds everything that follows in what your guests actually encounter.

patrick@vianarra.com | +1 (650) 418-0507

Frequently Asked Questions

What does a Vianarra guest experience audit look at?

The audit follows the whole guest journey, from the driveway to the goodbye. It reads the arrival, the tasting room culture, how staff carry the story, the flow of the space, the wine list, and how it all holds under a peak-hour rush. You get a blunt findings report, the gaps ordered by what they are costing you, and a call to walk through it.

How does the audit affect wine club conversion?

Membership is won or lost on the tasting room floor. The audit shows where the story stops reaching the guest at the bar, and what that gap is costing on conversion, guest spend, and word of mouth. It is rarely the tier structure.

Do you offer storytelling training for front-of-house staff?

Yes. Onsite workshops for servers, bartenders, tasting room staff, and front desk teams, built around your property rather than a template. Sessions are recorded so part-time and seasonal staff can take the training on their own time.

What does a National Park Service background have to do with hospitality?

Interpretation is a formal discipline with a literature going back to Freeman Tilden in 1957. It trains a person to read an audience before speaking to it, connect a place to the people standing in it, and hold attention without a script. That is the same skill a tasting room host needs on a Saturday afternoon.

Where do you work?

Sonoma County, Napa Valley, Amador County, Livermore, the Reno-Tahoe corridor, and Lake Tahoe. Travel elsewhere by arrangement.