Cruising With Cork Hounds

Cruising With Cork Hounds, originally published in Touring & Tasting, spring/summer 2020.

Traveling with your favorite furry friend? The handy Cork Hounds website and app makes your hunt for dog friendly vineyards especially easy. Search for pooch-pleasing vineyards and wineries throughout the U.S. with the free database.

Founders Peggy Mihelich and Jeremy Glesner created Cork Hounds in 2016, after a weekend trip to Harpers Ferry, West Virginia. “In addition to exploring this historic town … we wanted to visit some of the vineyards,” explains Mihelich.

It was a cold and windy March day and with Bentley and Greta (their dogs), there was no way they could sit outside and taste wine. Trying to figure out which vineyards had dog-friendly tasting rooms took “lots of Google searches and quite a few U-turns … I thought, there has to be an easier way! Wouldn’t it be great if there was a website, one place, where we could just find out all this information, so we’d know before we go?”

Glesner, a technology executive in the Washington, D.C. area, responded, “I can build that!”

Mihelich came up with the name Cork Hounds, the domain was available, and they bought it that weekend.

With so many wineries going to the dogs in the past few years, Cork Hounds’ directory now contains 5,662 vineyards and wineries and 1,406 dog-friendly tasting rooms, across all 50 states.

“Getting to travel to various dog-friendly vineyards and wineries across the U.S is probably the best part of running Cork Hounds,” says Mihelich. “We’ve attended wine-dog charity events; these experiences have not only shown us that people love bringing their dogs to wineries, but also that our service is loved and appreciated by dog owners and winery owners.”

She believes, “By welcoming owners and their dogs, people stay longer and have a better time. They enjoy themselves more because they have their dog(s) with them, and they don’t have to rush home to take care of the dog(s). With so much competition out there, vineyards and wineries who turn away customers with dogs are losing out.” corkhounds.com

Originally published in the spring/summer 2020 issue of Touring & Tasting. Click here to read this story and more! TT-SP20.digital