our Story

David’s fascination with wine started as a child when he would look at all the different colored capsules on the necks of the bottles sticking out of the racks of his dad’s wine collection. These colorful “dots” were intriguing and somehow felt like they had stories to tell or magic to share. Years later, David and his parents went to Paris for the first time, and he transformed from an American teenager that wasn’t very interested in food to a freshly minted foodie trying lamb, foie gras, and of course some wine at the table.

With the curiosity sparked, David returned home and started learning about food, drooling at the cheese counter, and enjoying the previously uninteresting food that his parents enjoyed. David’s dad also started to teach him about wine, allowing David to drink wine at dinner and training his palate on aged Bordeaux. To this day, David still has a soft spot for brett-y aged reds.

During college, David skipped the keggers and kept trying new wines and learning to cook along with his official studies of international business and political science. Fun Fact David published an academic paper as an undergrad! After school David moved around trying to find his place in the world, and while looking for “real work” ended up taking his first food and wine job at Cost Plus World Market in 2001. This is when Yellow Tail, Jacob’s Creek, and Yalumba were new to the States and mind blowing for American wine drinkers - tasty and cheap! 

“Real work” never materialized partly because of the tech bubble bursting, so David decided to go to culinary school in Portland, Oregon. Just a year later he had a substantially better understanding of food, cooking, restaurants and a deeper but still insatiable knowledge of wine. After bouncing around through various culinary jobs, David realized he loved food and cooking, but didn’t love doing it for a living, so back to school again, this time training to become a sommelier. He passed his certification with the International Sommelier Guild in 2004 and continued to learn, taste, and work his way through both Oregon wine and fascinating wines from around the world. 

In the more than 20 years since becoming a sommelier David has done it all, worked in grocery stores, wine bars, wineries, restaurants, leading wine tours, volunteering for big deal wine events like IPNC, and opening a couple of wine focused businesses in Portland, OR (and now in Belfast, ME). Red Slate Wine Company started in 2008 in industrial SE Portland, OR as a place where David could offer tastings, events, and sell wine retail. A few years later, just down the hall from Red Slate, he opened Ambonnay Champagne Bar. This was a bold choice since his guests could either have champagne or water, no other beverages! He was also very fortunate to meet a fellow champagne lover at his bar - Kristin! 

In late 2019 David sold Ambonnay and along with Kristin and Bernie moved to White Salmon, WA in the Columbia River Gorge to live off grid with the dream of opening another wine bar. Dreams do come true and as you know there was a bit of an unexpected plot twist, the new wine bar happened to be 3000 miles away and instead of a short commute into town, became a much shorter commute downstairs. 

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Kristin has been in wine since…well…we opened the doors to Pulling Corks on March 21, 2025. She’s had a long love affair with wine and she (now) has a lot of experience with wine but her understanding of wine is more like wine for poets and less the classic sommelier path.

In her life before wine bar co-owner, she was a small animal veterinarian. She opened her own clinic in Portland, OR in 2008 selling it to 2 of her associates in 2018 and officially leaving Veterinary Medicine in 2019.

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 surrounding our property. It was devastating.

3. Following clear cutting the accepted practice is generalized herbicide spraying and burning slash piles which we did NOT want to experience.

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. The number one criteria was we needed a wine friendly state that brought in the caliber of wines we were interested in serving. 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 on Maine.

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 dismal. 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 house hunting 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”.

And we kid you not, no sooner had the words left his mouth, we got out of the car and started heading up Main St. and there (!!!), 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 Kim, 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 longer 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 explicitly 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, OR 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 amazing knowledge of Megan at the Belfast Historical Society this is what we’ve discovered about the building’s lineage. There were also times that the building was empty/abandoned. We know this because one of our plumbers used to sneak in as a kid!

July 2023 We purchased the building!

2016 - 2023 Bella Books

1980s - 2016 Cold Mountain Builders, Trillium Catering, artists studios

1900s - 1980s Storage for Hall Hardware - including dangerous items like dynamite! (They stopped storing dangerous items in 1970s).

1870s Watt’s Stable/Livery started business. The building was part of their Livery business and aWheelwright’s Studio (likely built somewhere between 1870s and 1890s).

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