The Incredible Shrinking Winery
More than five years, three lawyers, two engineers, and one garage — and all the Williams want is a dinner party. Or so they say now.
There is a moment in every long-running dispute when the arguments become so contorted, so stripped of their original ambition, that you have to step back and ask: what are we even fighting about anymore?
We have arrived at that moment in the Fox Hill Estate & Vineyard saga.
After five years of applications, two attorneys, an engineering firm, multiple public hearings, a ten-day public comment extension, a parade of neighbor letters, at least two revised project narratives, a surprise announcement of previously undisclosed wine production in a residential garage, and what can only be described as the most expensive game of municipal telephone in Columbia County history - the Williams have arrived at what their representatives now describe as the sum total of their ambitions.
Are you ready?
Twelve people. By invitation only. Maybe five or six times a year.
That’s it. That’s the project. That is what all of this has been about.
If you believe that, I have a 53.7-acre estate with a stone façade and climbing pillars I’d like to sell you.
Let’s rewind, because the trajectory of this application is itself the story - a case study in strategic miniaturization, in which an applicant’s proposal shrinks in direct proportion to the legal obstacles it encounters, while the underlying intent remains as visible as the Williams’ hilltop mansion from the valley below.
It started as a wedding venue. One hundred to one fifty guests. Partying to the wee hours. Facebook posts. A website. The neighbors revolted.
Then it became a tasting room with an outdoor event space. Fifteen events per year. Fifteen to twenty people at each - though other documents mentioned forty. Portable restrooms. A gravel parking lot. A converted garage. The application went to the Planning Board, which asked for documents the applicants didn’t provide. The town’s consulting engineer cataloged a litany of deficiencies. The neighbors submitted twenty-plus letters. Not a single letter of support materialized. The Williams’ own filings mentioned plans for 800 vines - but while Ed’s lawyers carefully frame a modest operation, his own letter, published in the December 5, 2025 installment of this series, reflects an ambition of 5,000.
Then the outdoor event space quietly disappeared. The September 2025 project narrative from Crawford and Associates superseded the earlier one, and the Williams’ representative told the Zoning Board in January that the prior narrative - the one that included outdoor events - should not have been considered in the current determination. The application was, you see, always just about the garage.
And now, as of the January 31 letter from Crawford and Associates to the ZBA, the tasting room itself has undergone yet another rhinoplasty. It “would not be open daily.” It would operate “on a limited basis allowing for a small group of patrons on a reservation basis.” It would be “staffed by the owners who would allow samples of their wine to be tasted.” The proposal, we are now told, is for invitation-only tastings for perhaps a dozen people, a handful of times per year.
Five years. Three lawyers. Two engineers. Countless hours of public meetings, neighbor testimony, legal briefings, and procedural maneuvering - all for the right to pour wine for twelve friends in a garage.
If that were actually what the Williams wanted to do, they wouldn’t need a lawyer. They wouldn’t need an engineer. They wouldn’t need a project narrative or a site plan or a parking area that accommodates eight vehicles. They wouldn’t need Crawford and Associates of Hudson. They wouldn’t need Shulman Howard & McPherson of Averill Park. They would just invite their friends over, open some bottles, and call it Tuesday.
What they need all of this apparatus for is something else entirely - the legal entitlement. The accessory use determination. The precedent. Because once the town blesses a tasting room as an accessory use to agriculture in an RL-2 district, the scale is a matter of future negotiation. Today it’s twelve people by invitation. Tomorrow it’s twenty by reservation. Next year it’s forty on Saturdays. The year after that, the garage needs an addition. And before you know it, the neighbors are writing their thirtieth letter to a Zoning Board that has already given away the store.
Everyone on Bashford Road understands this. It’s why they keep showing up.
The ten-day extension of the public hearing - the one Chair Dan Persing granted, the one for which Persing refused to provide public notice when asked - produced exactly what anyone paying attention would have predicted: more letters from the neighbors saying what the neighbors have been saying for over five years, and a fresh round of legal correspondence that reveals the widening gap between what the law requires and what the Williams’ representatives are willing to acknowledge.
Khosrova’s February 2 letter to the ZBA is surgical. It addresses the Crawford and Shulman Howard letters point by point and reduces the entire dispute to a single question: the proper definition of “accessory use” under Section 180-4(B) of the Town of Chatham Zoning Code.
The definition requires that an accessory use be “of a nature customarily incidental and subordinate to the principal use or structure.” Khosrova asks the question the board should have asked from the beginning: accessory to what? Is the conversion of the garage an accessory use to the home, or to the vineyard? Because the principal use of a property dominated by a 7,000-square-foot residence is residential. The vineyard - 400 plants producing fewer than 160 bottles - is not the principal use. It is, to borrow a term from the plastic surgery profession, cosmetic.
Khosrova dispatches the argument that the Williams are being treated differently than other agricultural operators in the town. Crawford’s letter asserts that “numerous properties” in Chatham have both homes and agricultural activities. No specific locations are given. Shulman Howard’s letter implies the same. Khosrova went and checked. He filed a FOIL request with the town for all accessory use permits granted that were not associated with garages, pools, porches, or sheds. He received four. All four were Home Occupation approvals - the kind of low-impact, residential-compatible uses the accessory use provision was designed for. Not one involved a commercial tasting room. Not one involved serving alcohol to the public.
The most devastating passage addresses what would happen if the Williams’ interpretation of “agricultural use” were accepted. Under their theory, the permitted use of “Agriculture, including the sale of farm produce” encompasses the manufacture and retail sale of wine from a converted residential garage. Khosrova notes the logical endpoint: if that’s true, then a residential owner with one cow could erect a slaughterhouse, and a residential owner growing barley could open a brewery. The absurdity is the point. Under the Agriculture and Markets Law, even actual farm operations in designated agricultural districts must meet specific proportional revenue ratios - the 70-30 rule - before they’re permitted to have a commercial sales operation. The Williams’ representatives are arguing that their clients, who are not in an agricultural district and who do not hold a farm winery license, should be subject to none of those restrictions.
As Khosrova puts it: it defies all logic that a farmer has limitations, but the Williamses would not.
There is also the matter of what “produce” means under the zoning code. The permitted use allows the sale of farm produce. Grapes are produce. Wine is not. Wine is a manufactured product - it requires processing, fermentation, bottling, and, in New York, a license. Allowing the Williamses to sell grapes from a farm stand would be unremarkable. Allowing them to convert those grapes into a commercial product and serve it to the public from a renovated garage in a residential neighborhood is an entirely different proposition - one the zoning code does not authorize.
Meanwhile, the Williams’ attorney Lawrence Howard, writing on February 1 from Shulman Howard & McPherson, offers the board a letter that is less a legal argument than a reframing exercise. Howard asks the board to consider “a fundamental question: why are the Williamses and their vineyard being treated differently from other farmers and agricultural operations in the Town of Chatham?” The renovation of the garage to accommodate “invitation-only tasting events, limited in number and size, does not create impacts that distinguish this operation from other permitted agricultural uses.”
It’s a good question. Let me answer it.
Because the Williamses are not farmers. Because 400 grapevines on a 53.7-acre residential estate dominated by a mansion with a pool is not a farm. Because producing 150 bottles of wine - roughly what a spirited dinner party in the Hamptons might consume - is not agriculture in any sense that the zoning code recognizes. Because they don’t have a farm winery license. Because they’re not in an agricultural district. Because the Building Department inspector who made the initial accessory use determination didn’t know that. Because the application has been revised so many times that the September 2025 narrative superseded the earlier one, which included outdoor events the Williams now say were never part of the proposal. Because the wine was supposedly made off-site by a contract manufacturer until the January 22 hearing, when it was suddenly revealed to have been produced in the garage all along. Because the neighbors have been saying all of this, in writing, for more than half a decade.
That’s why they’re being treated differently. They’re being treated differently because the facts are different.
Howard’s letter also introduces an argument about Chapter 137, Chatham’s Farming Law, which defines “Farm Operation” to include practices necessary for the on-farm “production, preparation and marketing of agricultural commodities.” Converting grapes into wine through tasting events, Howard argues, qualifies as a commercial agricultural practice the Town encourages. But this argument contains its own refutation. The Farming Law exists to protect legitimate agricultural operations -operations in agricultural districts, meeting production thresholds, subject to the regulatory framework the state has established. It does not exist to allow residential homeowners to bootstrap a commercial tasting room by planting grapevines and declaring themselves vintners. If it did, every homeowner with a vegetable garden could open a restaurant.
Howard further argues that the tasting room would not require site plan review because agriculture, including the sale of farm produce, is a permitted use in RL-2 and has “never been subject to site plan review.” But the tasting room is not a farm stand. A farm stand sells raw agricultural products - tomatoes, corn, apples, grapes. A tasting room serves a manufactured alcoholic beverage to paying customers inside a renovated structure. These are categorically different activities, and no amount of linguistic creativity can make them the same thing.
Chuck Schwarz, who lives at 140 Bashford Road about two miles from the Williams property, captured the sentiment of many residents in his January 30 letter to the ZBA. After years of letters and protests, he wrote, “it is time to bring it to an end.” The Williams, he observed, “appear to have the financial resources and muscle to pursue this project despite zoning codes and the overwhelming concerns of their neighbors.”
Peter McKenna at 529 Bashford Road - two doors down from the proposed tasting room - was more pointed. He noted that the property has been clearly established as not being in an agricultural district. The real question, McKenna argued, is whether the approval for a retail store and tasting room should be rescinded. He rejected the Williams’ claim that the retail space is subordinate to the agricultural activity: “I don’t think manufacturing and retail belong in a residential neighborhood.”
Karen McGraw, also at 529 Bashford Road, submitted a detailed letter raising questions that no one from the Williams’ side has answered. She noted that the original application to the Planning Board described the project as including “a tasting room and outdoor event space” - far more extensive than a farm stand. She questioned whether the Williams intend to manufacture wine in the building earmarked for the tasting room, noting concerns about manufacturing operations in a residential area. She referenced the 2023 draft Comprehensive Plan, which recommends that any new agricultural use be “accessory and subordinate to the principal agricultural function of the land” and that it “not substantially change the nature of potential impacts to surrounding properties.” With upwards of twenty-one planned events - fifteen tastings plus the six outdoor events mentioned in the earlier application - she concluded that the Williams’ proposal fails that test.
Mercer Warriner and George Lewis objected to the increased traffic, noise, and alcohol consumption on roads where children ride bikes, adults walk dogs, and horses have the right of way. They raised the water table issue - they’ve personally run out of water during droughts with just four people using it. No one has studied what a vineyard and commercial operation would do to the shared aquifer.
Regina Wenzek raised the infrastructure concerns directly: narrow dirt roads, close neighbors, irrigation and chemical runoff, potential impacts on neighboring wells. She asked a question that remains unanswered: who will monitor this? And she made the point that has threaded through every public comment since the beginning: this is not about one property owner’s rights. This is about the community that exists on Bashford Road and what happens to it when someone with resources decides the rules are suggestions.
Let me tell you what I think is actually happening, because the legal maneuvering obscures a fairly simple dynamic.
The Williams wanted a wedding venue. They couldn’t get one. They wanted a tasting room with outdoor events. They couldn’t get that either. They now say they want invitation-only tastings for a dozen people, five times a year. If that were genuinely the extent of their ambitions - if Ed and Cherie Williams truly wanted nothing more than to pour homemade wine for a few friends on occasional Saturdays - they could do it tomorrow. No application required. No engineer. No lawyer. No ZBA hearing. You don’t need a zoning determination to have people over for dinner.
What they need the determination for is the precedent. What they need the accessory use classification for is the entitlement. What they need the board’s blessing for is the first inch of a mile they intend to walk. The twelve guests become twenty. The five events become fifteen. The invitation-only format becomes reservation-based, then walk-in, then “well, we posted it on Instagram and people just showed up.” The 400 vines become 800, then 5,000 - which, I remind you, is the number Ed Williams stated in his own letter, published in this series and now posted on the town’s website.
This is not speculation. This is the documented history of the application itself, which has expanded, contracted, been revised, superseded, resubmitted, and recharacterized at every stage to match whatever legal theory seemed most promising at the moment. The project narrative submitted in September 2025 explicitly superseded the earlier one. The outdoor events disappeared. The wine that was made off-site was suddenly made on-site. The commercial tasting room became an invitation-only gathering for friends. Each revision responds to a legal obstacle by narrowing the stated ambition while preserving the structural approval that would allow future expansion.
Khosrova sees it. The neighbors see it. Anyone who has watched a municipal approval process understands the playbook. The only question is whether the Chatham ZBA sees it - or whether the board will continue to treat a question of law as a question of community sentiment, holding hearings and accepting comments on a matter that requires neither.
The Chatham Zoning Code, Section 180-3, provides that interpretation and application of the Code must employ “the most restrictive” reading or “those imposing the higher standards.” That’s not ambiguous. It doesn’t invite creative lawyering about the definition of agriculture or the scope of accessory use. It tells the board that when in doubt, the restrictive interpretation governs.
A wine tasting room - however small, however infrequent, however charmingly described as an invitation-only gathering of friends - is a commercial retail operation. It serves alcohol to the public. It requires state licensing. It generates traffic. It transforms a residential accessory structure into a commercial one. Under the most restrictive interpretation of the zoning code - the interpretation the code itself demands - it is not a permitted accessory use in an RL-2 district.
The law is not complicated. The facts are not in dispute. The only thing missing is a board willing to say so.
The public comment period has closed. The letters have been submitted. The legal arguments have been made. What happens next is up to the Chatham ZBA. Will they answer the question that has been before them since December - a question of law, with a legal answer - or will they find another way to keep the process alive, another extension, another hearing, another opportunity for the application that won’t die to stumble forward on legs it doesn’t have?
The neighbors are watching. They’ve been watching for five years. They’ll keep watching, because that’s what you do when someone is trying to turn your dirt road into a destination.
And the Williams will keep shrinking their proposal - until it’s small enough to fit through the eye of a legal needle, and then, having threaded it, they’ll start growing again. That’s the play. That’s always been the play.
The only question is whether anyone at the Town of Chatham is willing to call it what it is.
Other parts of this series:
Part One: The Grapes of Wrath
Part Two: The War of the Rosé
Part Three: Vineyard Tasting Room Proposal Faces Legal Hurdles in Chatham
Part Four: Is Fox Hill The Hill To Die On?
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If you have something to share, let me know - josh@thepowellhousepress.com