In 2010, Henderson native Chris Dunaway was just out of college and working part-time as a bartender at a wine bar in Nicholasville, where the owner would “pour me a handful of wines to taste before work” to help educate him about the vast and complex field.
That helped set Dunaway on a path that took him to wine jobs in New York City, then to the tony ski resort of Aspen where as head sommelier, or trained wine steward, at Element 47, a restaurant with one of the most prestigious wine programs in the country. He became wine director in 2019.
Last month, Dunaway was honored as the 2024 Colorado Sommelier of the Year by Michelin Guide, the biggest and perhaps most prestigious restaurant guide in the world. He’s just 36.
“It’s all been kind of a blur,” he said in a phone interview.
Dunaway had been interviewed by Michelin Guide in August, then was invited to a Sept. 9 ceremony in Denver; he learned that he would be named Colorado Sommelier of the Year at 7:30 that morning.
“My initial reaction was excitement, but also I was really hoping the award would focus on the entire team” of four sommeliers at Element 47, located inside The Little Nell hotel mere feet from the ski slopes of Aspen, Dunaway said.
“For me, I think our greatest strength is the camaraderie, the collaborative effort we all put into service here,” he said. “I was hoping it would be an award for the entire sommelier team. It was a bit bittersweet. But I’m incredibly grateful. I always hope my team is put in the spotlight because they are incredible professionals dedicated to excellence in wine service.”
The Michelin awards ceremony “was all kind of surreal,” Dunaway said. “It’s not something I went after. I try to put guests first and have fun with wine.”
When he’s working on the floor of the restaurant and hears from diners what kind of wine they would like, “Sometimes I’ll bring three bottles to table, all in the style (they) asked for but in different ways, or maybe something completely out of left field. I’ll ask the question: ‘Do you feel like traveling tonight, or staying home?’”
Dunaway had some exposure to wine while growing up. His maternal grandfather grew grapes and made a sweet wine to which he added sugar to boost the alcohol content during fermentation, then aged it in a wooden barrel in his toolshed. “In fact, the day I was born, my mom’s side of the family was at my uncle’s, crushing grapes,” he said.
Years later, his grandmother revealed that his grandfather used a recipe that had been handed down for generations going back to the family’s roots in Germany. (Later still to his amusement, he learned that the wine his grandfather made was akin to Madeira, a fortified wine made on the Portuguese Madeira Islands off the coast of Africa.)
Dunaway tasted finer wines when his older siblings, David and Erin, would bring bottles back from college. “I liked what it did for conviviality at the table,” he said. “After a couple of bottles, the stories would get better.”
Today, Dunaway unmistakably is a wine expert. He passed the Court of Master Sommeliers’ challenging Level III Advanced Sommelier exam on his first attempt in 2016, which The Little Nell website calls “a remarkable feat.”
He’s now working to pass the grueling Master Sommelier Diploma Examination. It’s a three-part process that begins with a 100-question oral theory exam by two Master Sommeliers. It’s not just about grapes and wine, but culture, history, geology. Nine out of 10 sommeliers who take that first exam fail; Dunaway has passed it.
The second exam is even tougher. A candidate is presented six glasses of wine — three red, three white — and challenged to identify not just the grape or blend of varietals, but the region where it was grown and the year—in 1994, say—in which the wine was produced.
The final test examines a candidate’s practical skills, such as courtesy, hospitality and salesmanship.
Fewer than 300 people in the world have passed all three exams within the allotted three years to qualify as Master Sommeliers, he said; 13 have worked at Element 47.
Yet Dunaway advocates for making the enjoyment of wine approachable, not exclusive (even if some of the 20,000 bottles of wine at Element 47 sell for $10,000 to $20,000). In an interview with Michelin Guide, he lauded writers for the British-based wine publication Noble Rot who he said “make wine approachable in a way that makes you grin and laugh and enjoy it, rather than making you feel small about it.”
Dunaway said he keeps the wine cellar at Element 47 stocked with classics—prized wines from Napa, Bordeaux, Germany, the Piedmont region of Italy and so on—as well as lesser known but worthy bottles from Greece, Sicily, peripheral regions of Portugal and Canada and, most recently, Australia and South Africa.
He considers himself fortunate to have found himself where he is in Aspen. He first heard of The Little Nell from a fellow student while in a sommelier course in New York City; it came up again in a 2012 documentary about aspiring sommeliers called “Somm.”
“There’s that name again,” Dunaway thought. Then he saw a posting on a job board for head sommelier at The Little Nell. Despite thinking “I’m definitely not ready for that,” he “went for it, had a couple of great interviews” and landed the job in 2015.
Opened in 1989, The Little Nell “is a fabulous hotel,” Dunaway said. “It’s really well done. The service is outstanding,” and its position alongside ski slopes is spectacular.
“It’s the only ski-in, ski-out hotel in the city of Aspen currently,” he said. For its part, Michelin Guide said The Little Nell “might just be the finest ski hotel in the United States.”
At Aspen, Dunaway met his Australian-born wife, Bridget, and says they enjoy a lifestyle that includes wintertime snowboarding, great dining and, a couple of nights a year, the opportunity to stay at The Little Nell.
Looking ahead, he says he could foresee he and his wife moving to Australia, which said is an immensely livable place, though he would also love to stick around to help his company open a hotel it plans in New York’s Rockefeller Center.
His advice to friends about wine: “Be open to all different kinds,” even if it’s “kind of hard if you don’t know what’s out there.”
“One thing to make wine very enjoyable, make it a learning experience around food with family and people you care about,” Dunaway said. “That’s the most enjoyable thing about it: it brings people together. There’s nothing better.”
