As we celebrate visiting and writing about our 500^th tasting room, we reminisced on the many wonderful places our travels have taken us. During those visits we are asked many questions from other wine enthusiasts, owners and winemakers. The one most asked question is why we created Wine Trail Traveler.

During the fall of 2006 Kathy and I were finishing our teaching careers. Kathy was a home hospital teacher for students with special needs. I was teaching my last graduate course and supervising a student intern at a local high school. During that autumn Kathy expressed a desire to go into journalism, a life-long dream. While at a doctor appointment we were asked what we like to do for fun and entertainment. Our response was visit winery tasting rooms. Our doctor responded that he would love to visit tasting rooms but would feel uncomfortable and not know what to do. A light bulb turned on.

We had previously visited winery tasting rooms in Virginia, Pennsylvania, New York and Maryland and felt quite comfortable with the tasting room scene. We thought that we could use our education background and venture into the field of journalism to encourage people to visit tasting rooms. During the late fall of 2006 we visited several wineries and wrote articles about them. I took several photos and added them to the articles. Our next thought was how to get our writings viewed by the public. In January we designed the website, Wine Trail Traveler. By June of 2007 we had to redesign the website and were ecstatic that 1,000 people were visiting the website monthly. Now our monthly visitors have increased ten-fold.

We wrote about 155 wineries during 2007 and another 145 during 2008. At the start of 2010, we were 55 visits short of 500. Our 500^th visit takes place in Ohio, June 2010.

We look forward to reaching our 500^th winery and don’t plan on stopping at 500 but to continue exploring wine regions. Where will our next wine region be? Watch and see.

Cheers,

Terry