Live, Laugh, Love

The Winery at Wilcox family is pleased to unveil its newest specialty wine for the year and its very near and dear to our heart — Literally.

As many of you know, every year we release a specialty limited edition wine bottle. In past years the bottle was always blue, with one exception. 10 years ago, we made a pink bottle called Lucia. It was to celebrate the birth of my daughter Lucy. During that project one of our employees had the idea that maybe we should turn the pink bottle into a fundraiser/awareness campaign for breast cancer. So, we partnered with our local hospitals (Penn Highlands in Dubois, PA and Wayne Healthcare in Greenville, OH) to start a fundraising campaign. Over the life of the project we were able to raise approximately $80,000 dollars for those hospital systems. The money went directly to patient care in our local communities. It was awesome.

Last year in September the owner of the Winery at Wilcox family, Mike Williams, underwent a quadruple by-pass to fix blockages in the arteries surrounding his heart. The surgery was successful and Mike is back on his feet and doing well but it certainly rattled my family and the winery family as a whole. My sister, Lisa Heidenreich, whose job it is to come up with the new ideas for bottles every year, decided that this was a great opportunity for us to give back to our community again just as we had with Lucia. From there grew the idea. A red bottle (red for heart disease awareness), the name live, laugh, love, and the idea to donate a portion of the proceeds to our local heart care centers. She even incorporated a picture Mike’s heartbeat (from the EKG in the hospital) into the label.

On October 4th we unveiled the wine at our Dubois, PA location in front of a packed house of family, friends, and community guests and surprised my father (who somehow had no idea and we had done this) with label. He was surprised and honored. As it says on the label “Live, Laugh, Love is dedicated to a very dear member of our family who has taught us to live in the moment, laugh every day, and love with all our hearts. Our owner and winemaker, Mike Williams.” Two dollars from each bottle sale will go directly to the Penn Highlands Heart Center in Dubois, PA and the Kettering Health System in Dayton, OH (where his procedure was performed). We can only hope this campaign is as successful as the last. 

— Jamie Williams