-How did you start Storyteller wines?

Storyteller Wine Company was first dreamt up in a long car ride in Illinois with winemaker David O’Reilly. He was coming to the wine store I ran in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois and we had a chance to chat during the ride from Chicago. He stressed upon me the importance of having a story to tell. No matter how good your product was, if it didn’t have a good story behind it most people would never give it the time of day. The more I thought I about it, the more I realized that if we found a good wine, we’d probably sell five cases. But if we found a good wine that an interesting story behind it, whether it was about the winemaker, the vineyard or how we found it, then we would sell 15-20 cases. So when I was able to finally move my family back home to Oregon the summer of 2006, I knew I could start fresh with the Storyteller concept.

-What is your overall philosophy? Values?

I like to find wines that are interesting and tell a story about where they are from. I don’t care if a wine is 10.00 or 100.00, it has to be interesting and unique. There are way too many wines out there to sort through to waste time with anything else. Hence our unofficial store motto, “we spit so you don’t have to.”

-What makes your shop different? (besides having $150 super pours at a free tasting?!)

We are only open to the public on Friday and Saturdays and about 95% of our sales are to people across the United States that receive our electronic newsletter. We are not a traditional wine retail store where you can just pop in on your way home from work to score a bottle of New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc. But what we sell through the newsletter is usually pretty interesting and hard-to-get, sometimes even hard-to-get right here in Portland. We also have really low overhead so our prices tend to be lower than most in the Portland area. Price-wise Storyteller is competing against stores across the country, from K&L in California to Astor in NYC, so we have to keep our prices down to compete. But we do keep about 70-100 wines on hand in the store and folks in the neighborhood have figured out that if my red Subaru is parked out fronr, then the door is open for them to walk in and buy some wine.

-What do you love about being a wine shop owner?

I have an incredibly flexible schedule given this business model. If I need to pick up and drive to Walla Walla tomorrow, then I can do that without worrying about who is minding the store. The hunting down of new and interesting wines and then getting people excited about them is the best part of the wine business for me. I also love not working for other people. Don’t get me wrong. I have been quite fortunate to work for some folks I consider brilliant and savvy entrepreneurs, including Don Younger at the Horsebrass Pub, Doug Campbell at Bulldog News in Seattle and Jack Wallace and Dr. Geoff Bland in Illinois. But in the words of a friend of mine who started up his own restaurant, the worst day of working for yourself is better than the best day of working for somebody else. I like the fact that all the risks I take are all on me, but then I get to keep all the money. Well, at least all the money the government lets me keep.