Appalachia
Range

It’s all still here, but I’m making room for more–more topics, more collaborators, and more potential. This evolution enables Laurel and our other partners to share their stories and interests too.

All the great wine content created over the last few years is coming along on this adventure with us. We’re busy transferring the many great stories, interviews, reviews, and tasting notes to the new site.

Why the Change?

I launched WLAA in 2019 for testing marketing ideas, growing Hersick+Webster’s awareness with tourism folks, and sharpening my writing skills. 

The pandemic hit soon after, making writing a wine travel blog fairly impossible. Stuck at home, I kept the project moving by tasting wine, writing reviews, and studying for WSET certification.

And then the other shoe dropped. All the blossoming apple trees in the orchard beside our house were ripped out and set on fire to build yet another development on our dwindling farmland.

A design mentor of mine once said, “pay attention to what upsets you and start pulling on that thread.” 

That fire set a new fire in us. Maybe this project can do more. Maybe it can align even deeper and leverage all of our tourism and destination development experience. We can even explore ways to make things ourselves and inspire others to join in too.

With a bigger vision, we’ll celebrate and collect more stories, tastes, and places. Maybe we’ll even create more opportunities and momentum to preserve and sustain Appalachia’s cultural and culinary arts.

And so, the next chapter of this adventure is about to begin.