S.W. and Rich Hermansen
Guest Writers
wine@lbknews.com
We drank a bottle of wine that we later discovered was a gift intended for another person, 
Whoops, and we had no success finding the same wine at local stores. This pretext led us to the location of the seller of the misappropriated wine, a Limited Release Gewürztraminer from Biltmore Estate in Asheville, North Carolina.
A tropical storm meandering around the Gulf of Mexico prompted us to make a field trip to the Blue Ridge area of Appalachia, a mountainous area extending from south of Birmingham, Alabama to north of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and west of Atlanta, Georgia and Harrisburg, Pennsylvania and east of Nashville, Tennessee and Cleveland, Ohio.
From south to north, Appalachia has a similar terrain: rolling hills and mountains covered with hardwood trees and long river valleys with crops and pastures carved into somewhat level spaces near river beds carved out by glaciers and floods. The 206,000 square miles in Appalachia has 2.63 million inhabitants or 128 persons on average per square mile. Massachusetts has seven times the population density of Appalachia. During the hot summer months, the mountains have the cool evening temperatures and invigorating air quality that appeal to tourists. The popular Blue Ridge Parkway follows high ridges for 469 miles from the Great Smokies National Park in Tennessee to the Shenandoah National Park in Virginia. Parkway observation points offer panoramic views of the hills and valleys below the ridges.
Below the ridges, country roads twist and wind through gaps between small wooded mountains reminiscent of the Sierra Foothills