Meet the winemakers
The same ten questions, every winemaker.
Folklorists have a method for this. You ask everyone in a trade the same questions in the same order, and the differences between the answers become the thing worth reading. Edward Ives spent a career doing it with woodsmen and river drivers in Maine, and wrote the manual on how.
This series applies that method to winemaking. Ten questions, fixed, asked of every subject. Nobody gets a softer set and nobody gets a harder one. What comes back is an account of the work from the people doing it, rather than a tasting note or a brand story.
Recorded by video call, with the winemaker in the cellar rather than at a desk. Published as audio with a full transcript.
What gets asked
The same ten questions, every winemaker.
Ten questions, the same ten, in the same order, for everyone I talk to. They cover what was taught and what was abandoned, the words used in the cellar that don’t travel to the bar, and what a person would have to watch you do to understand a wine.
Nothing about scores. Nothing about the estate. No tasting notes.
The questions go out ahead of time to anyone who says yes, with three exceptions held back for the call itself.
Who this is for
Winemakers, cellar hands, and vineyard managers at any size of operation. The series has no interest in scores, allocations, or acreage. A person who has done the work for two harvests has something to say that a person who has done it for thirty does not, and the reverse holds.
Interviews run about thirty minutes. To be considered, write to patrick@vianarra.com.
The interviews
The first interview publishes this fall.