Notable Edible - Dunn & Sons Wine

A welcoming oasis of specialty wine in Yarmouth Port, Dunn & Sons is a natural outgrowth of the proprietors’ hospitality experience, with a little bit of pandemic pivot mixed in. Open since December 2022, the shop began as a small room inside The Pheasant restaurant in Dennis. Co-owner Erica Dunn, who also owns The Pheasant with her husband, Adam, explains, “That tiny little room took off.”

The focus at Dunn & Sons, as at The Pheasant, is on wines made by small producers who emphasize sustainable farming practices (often, organic and/or biodynamic) and minimal intervention. The shop carries a lot of natural wines, but Adam says he doesn’t highlight the term because it can confuse people or turn them off, and many of them “taste and smell like more traditional wines.”

With years of experience in the hospitality industry, the couple are dedicated to making customers’ time in their shop enjoyable. “We love to have conversations with our customers,” Adam says. “We’re curating wine for wine lovers who really care about where the wine comes from and are interested in learning more about the product.”

Adam, who owned a restaurant in Brooklyn before he and his wife moved to the Cape in 2018, became passionate about wine when he spent time reading about it at the start of the pandemic. Thanks to Massachusetts’ then-governor Charlie Baker’s 2020 executive order allowing bars and restaurants to sell wine and cocktails to go, when The Pheasant reopened after lockdown, the Dunns turned a portion of the dining room into a small wine shop. There, diners could peruse the collection and select a bottle to enjoy with their meal, take home, or both. “We were curating wines that I hadn’t seen on Cape Cod since we moved here. Wines I had been reading about and producers I’d been seeking out,” Adam says. “We had people – wine professionals and wine lovers – coming into the restaurant and they did a double-take. People really wanted to buy more. We wanted to give them more selection.”

The couple, who have two sons aged five and two, decided to open a stand-alone shop to meet that demand and, says Erica, because “I hadn’t found a place I liked to shop for wine. I often have questions and want someone to guide me.”

“I love all our producers’ stories,” she says. “It’s so fantastic when we get to meet the winemakers and taste their wines,” as they did in late April, when they hosted a winemaker dinner for sommelier/winemaker Patrick Cappiello at The Pheasant. “Maybe it’s something their family has been doing for generations and now the kids are taking over the business,” she continues. “Or maybe,” her husband interjects, “it was a conventionally farmed vineyard for generations and a younger generation is taking over and converting it to organic and biodynamic.”

“[Our] interest in wine carries over from our interests in food,” Adam says. “There’s something really special about having relationships with the people who grow your food or harvest your food. It’s only natural that that carries over to wine. Wine is food.”