Part 6: Is Fox Hill the Hill to Die On?

The January 22 Meeting was a waste of time. Why?

Ed and Cheri Williams still want to open a wine tasting room in their garage. The zoning doesn’t permit it. The licensing requirements aren’t met. The neighbors have objected for years. The application has never been complete. And yet the proposal won’t die—because no one at the Town of Chatham seems willing to kill it.

The Williams own an Architectural Digest-aspirational property in Chatham’s RL-2 district—Rural Land 2, a zoning classification whose stated purpose is “to preserve and protect, for the benefit of the town as a whole, the basically rural-agricultural character of the Town.” What they want is to convert their garage into a wine tasting room for Fox Hill Estate & Vineyard. Four hundred grapevines. Fewer than 160 bottles of annual production. And according to their prior submissions, not a drop of it made on the premises—the wine was produced off-site by a contract manufacturer. Or so the town was told, for years, until the story suddenly changed at a public hearing last …