our Story

for the love of wine

We started Pulling Corks because we love wine and we love sharing wine. We also love creating spaces and doing the satisfying (often challenging and sometimes difficult) work of business ownership. Pulling Corks is our creative playground with wine as our muse. We want to play with a new way of wine, whether we are offering compelling glass pours, bottles, snacks, wine friendly fare, and other delicious quality beverages or creating tastings and events that highlight the pleasurable experience of drinking and discovering something more about wine and maybe even more about yourself.

We bought the building at 31 Pendleton St. in July 2023 and spent the following 1 year and 8 months renovating the space, converting the upstairs into our apartment and the downstairs into Pulling Corks. It was quite a process with lots of physical work, bureaucratic work, finding professionals (architect, electrician, plumber, builder), solving problems (OMG THE WINDOWS!) and waiting…(lots of waiting) and finally (FINALLY) on the vernal equinox in late March of 2025 we opened the doors officially becoming part of the Belfast community.

  • David:

    Kristin: I’ve been in wine since…we opened the doors to Pulling Corks. I’ve always loved wine and I have a lot of experiences with wine but my understanding of wine is more like wine for poets and less the classic sommelier path.

  • We came to Maine from the Pacific NW, spending 20 years in or near Portland OR.

    We moved full time to the Columbia River Gorge in October 2019 with the idea of taking a couple of months off and then opening a wine bar in the area.

    Instead we spent 2020 and the following years working on our off grid home, hiking the land, foraging, tending to our infrastructure, learning herbalism (Kristin) & home improvement (David) while contemplating what was important in life, drinking wine and slowing down to really experience the seasons.

  • Honestly, living in White Salmon was a dream. We had an amazing view and had developed a wonderful quality of life. And yet, there was nowhere to open the wine bar we had been dreaming of.

    There were also some very scary wildfires in the area and getting worse. The wildfire season was getting to be A LOT with our GO Bags packed and being hypervigilant 6 months of the year.

    Just as we started to consider a change aa few things happened.

    1. Our wine maker friends opened an awesome wine bar in White Salmon (Soca and if you are ever there you should check it out!)

    2. As COVID was opening up, our neighbors who had sold us our home decided to sell their land (as we said, the wildfires were BAD!). They sold the surrounding 100 acres to a family that owned a logging company (you see where this is going, don’t you?). The family promised not to log and then proceeded to clear cut the entire 100 acres of old growth forest. It was devastating.

    3. Following clear cutting meant generalized herbicide spraying and burn piles.

    Needless to say, we HAD to leave. Very quickly we sold the house, put our things in storage, bought a teardrop trailer and loaded up our truck with 2 cases of wine and our dog and hit the road, looking for what was next.

  • The short answer is we were drawn here, sight unseen with no connections and we love it here.

    The longer answer is when we left our off grid home in White Salmon, Washington, we went on a 5 month journey across the country looking for where to land. We knew we wanted a northern climate and a town with a community spirit. What we really REALLY wanted was a building with a live/work possibility to open our wine bar & shop.

    As you can see we found that here in Belfast!

    We had finally made it to Maine, actually searching more inland (like Skowhegan and Starks!) and the building search wasn’t quite working out. We decided to check out Vermont and looked all over with nothing quite feeling right. We came back to Maine and spent some time on the midcoast in the Camden area and still weren’t finding anything concrete. So we headed to upstate NY where we found a really fun little building that we got really excited about and yet…it just didn’t feel right so we decided Maine it was going to be!

    We landed at a 3 month rental in Topsham and continued our search, starting to compromise our dream of a building and looking at houses. The house hunt was pretty difficult. We found some pretty cool places in horrible condition all up and down the midcoast. One day during a very disappointing house hunting day in the Belfast area we took a break to come into town. It was lunchtime in June so parking was tough. We rolled down Main St and the last parking spot by the green was thankfully open.

    When we stopped. David just sat there for a minute with his head on the steering wheel sharing his feelings of how awful the househunting had been. He said “I just thought there’d be a sign. You know, we’d be driving down the road and there’d be a sign for a building for sale. I just thought there’d be a sign”.

    We got out of the car and started heading up Main St. and there…NO KIDDING (!!!), on the side of Bobby Pin by the green was a small FOR SALE BY OWNER sign! It was for the building and the bookstore business.

    We were stunned! Kristin didn’t even want to go look she was so shocked. We did go look and from the first sight, we knew this was it! We tried peeking in the windows, wrote down the number and contacted the owner on the way back to Topsham.

    We came up the next day to actually look inside and were so excited to poke around and really take in the building. We met Kim and introduced ourselves. We talked and she told us that she was already under contract with someone but we’d be next in line if anything changed. Kristin told her that “she was pretty sure this was our building” and to keep us posted.

    Ten days before her closing date, the previous buyer pulled out and we scrambled to get everything lined up so Kim could make the deadline to close on her dream home.

    As you can see, it all worked out!

  • The short answer is at David’s Champagne Bar - Ambonnay.

    The story:

    When David decided to break his own rule “Never Pick Up Someone at His Own Bar”, Kristin disappeared for a month. That fated day when she ran in, out of breath, 10 minutes before close begging for champagne and popcorn was the rom-com start to our courtship.

    As with any love story there are always weird timeline things you realize after the fact. For one thing, Kristin was SO EXCITED to hear about Ambonnay opening, she told all of her friends and then it took her 3 years to go in.

    When she did go in, it became her go to place to hang out. She was a regular, bringing friends, relatives, and business associates in. She loved it.

    When David finally asked her out on that fated day, Kristin had no idea he was trying to ask her out, until she got a text the next day actually asking her out.

    It was an on again, off again, room mate and friend and then dating situation and through it all, there was (thankfully) this very important connection superseding it all.

    We made it official getting engaged in Paris in October 2016 and then a year later, on the Autumnal Equinox in 2017 we got married in Laurelhurst Park in NE Portland and had an epic parade with the entire wedding walking 2 miles from the park to the champagne bar with a second line band!

  • From the history we have gathered from people who know the building and the Belfast Historical Society this is the building’s lineage to the best of our knowledge. There were also times that the building was empty/abandoned and we know that one of our plumbers used to sneak in as a kid!

    July 2023 We purchased the building.

    Bella Books

    1980s Cold Mountain Builders, Trillium Catering, artists studios

    Storage for Hardware - including dangerous items like dynamite!

    1870s Built as a Livery Stable and Wheelwright’s studio

    At some point the building was wrapped in metal and the lean to shed was attached.