Every place has a Vianarra. Not every place knows how to tell it.
A hospitality storytelling practice founded by Patrick R. Dunn for premium wineries, boutique hotels, and independent restaurants.
Every vineyard, tasting room, and old inn has a story. Usually it lives in the owner’s head, and it never quite makes it to the guest standing at the bar on a Saturday afternoon. The wine gets poured, the room gets busy, and the thing that would have turned a first visit into a membership never gets said.
Vianarra works on that gap. It finds the true story a place already has, the one in the soil, the family, the building, the way the room feels at four o’clock, and builds it into how the property is run and how the staff talk to the people in front of them. A story the team actually knows, told the way it deserves.
The work runs across Sonoma County, Napa Valley, the Reno-Tahoe corridor, and Amador County, with winery owners, tasting room managers, hoteliers, and innkeepers
From the properties I write about
“What you captured so beautifully was something much larger: the care, intentionality, and genuine hospitality that our team strives to deliver every day.”
Michele Smith
Director of Marketing, Edgewood Tahoe Resort
Who this is for
Wineries and tasting rooms: wine club conversion, tasting room culture, and staff who can carry the story through a Saturday rush.
Boutique hotels and inns: a front desk that tells the same story the brochure promises, return stays, and consistency across the season.
Independent restaurants: regulars, wine list storytelling, and a service team that holds the standard when the room is full.
Tourism bureaus: destination storytelling and staff training built for the region, not a template.
The Story Found Along the Way
Premium hospitality isn’t built on a spreadsheet, and it isn’t achieved by forcing your tasting room or front-desk staff to memorize a corporate script. When a guest sits at your table, they aren’t just buying a pour of old-vine Zinfandel or a night in a boutique suite. They are looking for connection to the terrain, the heritage, and the craft.
Strategic Architecture for Owners, Winemakers, and General Managers
Wineries & Tasting Rooms: Wine club conversion strategies, tasting room culture, and staff training to turn casual visitors into lifelong advocates.
Boutique Hotels & Resorts: Front-of-house narrative alignment, guest experience elevation, and staff consistency across peak seasons.
Independent Restaurants: Service team training, wine list storytelling, and resilience workshops for restaurant teams under high-volume pressure.
Tourism Bureaus: Destination storytelling, resilience workshops for tourism teams, and community narrative architecture.
The Architect
Built from the Terrain.
How Vianarra Works
Vianarra is founded and led by Patrick R. Dunn.
Most hospitality consultants come up entirely inside the industry, with the same templates and the same scripts. Patrick came to it from somewhere else. He spent thirty years running operational crisis teams, through 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, Hurricane Sandy, and major resets across four continents, where the job was to hold a standard when everything was under pressure. He brings that same discipline to a tasting room on a busy Saturday.
The storytelling came first, though. He trained at the University of Maine under Stephen King and the folklorist Sandy Ives, where he learned to treat a story as a craft with real standards, not a marketing gimmick. Later, as a National Park Service interpretive ranger across six sites, he learned to read a room, read the terrain, and command an audience. That’s what he trains front-of-house teams to do: connect with the guest in front of them, honestly, without a script.
He’s a WSET Level 3 certified wine professional, with long-standing relationships across Sonoma County, the Russian River Valley, and Napa, working from his base in the Reno-Tahoe corridor. He knows the wine, the terroir, and the room, and he makes sure the story in the glass matches the welcome at the door.
Patrick is the author of Stop Leading on Empty (Archway / Simon & Schuster, April 2026).
Staff Workshops
Training your front-of-house team to deliver a real guest experience without a corporate script.
I run customized workshops on your property for servers, bartenders, tasting room staff, and front desk teams. They learn to read a room before they speak to it, hold the welcome when a rush hits, and tell your property’s story naturally.
Recorded, so part-time and seasonal staff can take the training on their own time, and it doesn’t walk out the door when someone leaves.
For wineries with high-volume tasting rooms, boutique hotels with seasonal turnover, restaurants, and hospitality associations.
The Guest Experience & Story Audit
A firsthand read of your guest journey, from the driveway to the goodbye.
I visit your property as a guest, with your permission, and walk the whole thing: the arrival, the tasting room culture, how the staff carry the story, the flow of the space, the wine list, and how it holds under a peak-hour rush.
You get a blunt findings report, a list of the gaps ordered by what they’re costing you, and a 45-minute call to walk through it.
For winery owners, tasting room managers, and boutique hotel GMs who want to know the gap between the story they mean to tell and the one their guests actually get.
Latest From Vianarra
FROM THIS WEEK’S NEWSLETTER
July 08, 2026
Waiting in the Dark
The Fourth of July had run hot all day, and by the time the heat finally let go I had the backyard to myself in Sparks. The firepit lit, the last of the daylight going out of the yard, nobody around but me. The bottle was the Ruxton Sands Rosé from Croix Estate, pulled cold from the refrigerator because on a day like that nothing else sounded right. I wasn’t working. There was no tasting room, no line at the door, nobody to convert into anything.
Vianarra Library
All Content | Stories | Insights | Newsletter | Guides
Guess the Wine
San Diego had a few quiet days left. Comic-Con was almost on the city, and once it landed the Gaslamp
Why the Reserve Pinot Comes Out at 3:45
A tasting room host who opens something off the menu is doing one of two things, and no depletion report
The Last Four Bottles
The party was on a Sunday in the middle of July, out on the lawn behind the tasting room, the
The Saturation of the Map
The crease on the paper splits down the middle of Dry Creek Valley first. By three on a Saturday, the
Death by Clone 115
A note on this one. I walked this tasting room floor myself. The names are left out to protect the
The Twenty-Minute Grace Period: Barbera and True Hospitality at Portalupi
Past the Closing Hour: Finding the Soul of California Barbera Healdsburg on a midsummer Wednesday afternoon sits in a rare,
Where this usually starts
Most wineries that reach out have the same number in front of them. Club conversion is down, the tasting room feels fine on a Saturday, and nobody can say exactly what changed.
It is rarely the tier structure. Wine club conversion is a messaging problem, and the mystery shop data from this spring shows how far the floor has gone quiet.
Wine club conversion is a messaging problem,
As Seen In
A practice is only as good as what it produces. Read Patrick’s hospitality storytelling across his primary content engines:
Business Insider: Featured Travel Columnist. Read ” I should have followed Rick Steves Packing Advice”
Edible Reno-Tahoe: Featured columnist on hospitality, wine, and regional food culture. Read “Tea with an Edge” and additional features
Next Steps
For the Newsletter: Free, weekly, stories from places worth remembering.
A Conversation: Book a call with Patrick. Thirty minutes on your property’s story.
Questions? Email [email protected]
or call 650-418-0507.