The Wine Wars: Donal Collins and the Myth of Protecting Farms
Donal Collins ran a campaign on protecting farms and making Chatham affordable. His position on Fox Hill Vineyards does the opposite. Is he uninformed, or informed by his personal business?
Donal Collins, Town Supervisor of Chatham, presents in public as a defender of Columbia County agriculture. The town website says so. The press releases say so. The Fox Hill Vineyards file at 509 Bashford Road says otherwise.
The applicant, plastic surgeon Ed Williams, who has trademarked himself at the United States Patent and Trademark Office as “The White Coat Entrepreneur” and his wife Cherie filed the 303-b paperwork last October to enroll the parcel in Columbia County Agricultural District 10. The filing listed cattle grazing among the property’s farm activities. There is no cattle grazing. There are no cattle.
Northern Columbia County is small. Anyone in town whoo has driven past 509 Bashford Road can see what is on the land and what is not. So can the Town Supervisor, who happens to share an undisclosed business arrangement with the applicants. He did not flag the discrepancies. He continued to call the project a real farming effort.
Collins eventually recused. He has not, to this day, disclosed the terms of his arrangement with Williams. The financial disclosure form he is required to file annually has been filed exactly once, this March. The Williamses are under no obligation to fill in the blanks on his behalf, and on present form they will not. Earlier Planning Board testimony in which Williams left board members with the impression of an academic agriculture background was, like the cattle, like the barns, an instructive flourish.
Collins’ 2019 campaign site promised to "ensure Chatham remains family-friendly, farm-friendly and business-friendly," and his bio claimed he and his partner had "carried on the farming tradition," selling hay, compost, eggs, small fruit, and beef on the hoof.
The set piece is otherwise familiar. The hilltop mansion. The token vineyard occupying roughly one percent of the parcel. The branded self-image. The wedding venue beaten back by the neighbors before COVID and quietly substituted with a tasting room. Williams’s own attorney admitted on the record that the wine to be sold there will be other people’s wine. The detailed plans the Planning Board has repeatedly asked for have not been produced.
But in all the mist obscuring what this project really is or wants to be is a rich history of projects like them and what they have done to farming and communities.
New York has spent the better part of two decades documenting what this kind of project produces. Williams and Collins did not invent the genre. They are running a late entry in it.
The legal vehicle is Article 25-AA of the New York Agriculture and Markets Law, enacted in 1971 for the dairy farmer. It values farmland inside a state agricultural district at use rather than market value (Section 305(1)). It exempts new farm buildings from property tax for a decade (Section 483 of the Real Property Tax Law). It bars towns from “unreasonably restrict[ing]” farm operations (Section 305-a), with the Commissioner of Agriculture and Markets in Albany deciding what counts as unreasonable. Town boards do not. A 2017 Department guidance memo extended the protection to weddings, parties, harvest dinners, corporate galas, and concerts, provided the host farm’s own alcohol is marketed at them. Pair the memo with a State Liquor Authority farm-winery license (cheaper than a wedding-day open bar) and the conversion is complete. The horse paddock becomes an event center. The tax treatment, the zoning immunity, and the social cachet of “farm” all transfer. The agricultural production does not.
Between 2017 and 2022 New York lost 2,788 farms, 363,885 acres, and nearly 1,900 dairy operations. A forty-percent collapse of the dairy count in five years. Suffolk County, home of Long Island wine country, has one dairy farm left. The land did not vanish. It was bought, parcel by parcel, by a class of buyer who put up vines, built tasting rooms, and now hosts weddings on it under the same statute that was supposed to keep the dairyman in business.
The farmers who tried to compete for it lost. Maddie Morley and Benjamin Roberts, the New Paltz livestock couple, were outbid by buyer after buyer when their lease expired. Sarah Kingzack of KZ Farm watched her expansion plans collapse as the wave of cash swept north toward Lake Champlain. Gabriela Pereyra and her wife identified an eleven-acre Hudson Valley parcel listed at under $200,000 in April 2021. They had four days. The offer deadline closed before they had a chance. American Farmland Trust, the country’s leading farmland-protection organization, now runs a buy-back program in New York: it purchases working farmland on the open market, attaches a conservation easement, and resells the parcel at a discount to an actual farmer. The country’s leading farmland-protection organization has been forced to operate a remedial program to keep New York farmland in actual farming. That is the single most damning statistic in the file.
The buyer pool on the receiving end reads like a seating chart. Randy Frankel, Wall Street financier and Tampa Bay Rays co-owner, bought Shinn Estate in Mattituck in 2017 and rebranded it Rose Hill four years later. Dan Abrams, the ABC News legal correspondent, bought the 41-acre Laurel Lake Vineyards and renamed it Ev&Em after his children. The Soloviev family, of Manhattan commercial real estate, picked up the 53-acre Peconic Bay Winery in 2019. The Rivero-González family of Parras, Mexico paid $15 million for Martha Clara Vineyards in 2018, sold off the petting-zoo livestock that had been the property’s charm, expanded the event business, and rebranded the place RGNY. Bedell Cellars, the estate of the late film executive Michael Lynne, was listed at $17.9 million in 2019. A 147-acre Cutchogue farm-and-vineyard was listed at $19.5 million, trimmed to $16 million, and described by the broker Marianne Collins of Brown Harris Stevens, to the New York Post, as “extremely rare.” Syma Gerard, the agricultural realtor who has handled many of these transactions, summarized her actual buyer pool to Northforker in 2014: “they want the vineyard to support them. They want to have some gorgeous property where they’re going to live and make money.”
The Catskills version of the transaction is the second-home-to-Airbnb-to-event-venue pipeline. Ely and Danielle Franko, who opened the 16-room Henson hotel in Hensonville in May 2024, have publicly described the trajectory: a 2016 weekend property, an Airbnb conversion, a second property, a third, the COVID surge, the hotel, and a dedicated event venue going up next door. Catskill Farms in Wurtsboro has built 260-plus second homes for primarily Manhattan buyers across Sullivan, Ulster, and Dutchess. The wine investment industry’s own marketing now calls private vineyard ownership a “passion investment,” in the same sentence as fine watches and contemporary art. None of this language was in Article 25-AA when the legislature passed it.
The proportions in the actual planning files are the giveaway. The Winners Circle Winery proposal in Malta, filed in 2022 by a Halfmoon developer on a 127-acre former horse farm, contemplated eleven acres of grapes alongside a 5,000-square-foot tasting room, a 4,500-square-foot ice-cream-and-burger building, a 15,000-square-foot event center, weddings, concerts, a children’s playground with a bounce house and a train ride, and 314 parking spaces (250 of them designated for events). The hospitality footprint was substantially larger than the cropland. The state’s farm-winery definition has, since 1976, required only that 51 percent of the grapes used in production come from New York. The farm winery is not required to grow any of its own grapes. Eleven acres of vines is the legal entrance ticket. The hospitality business is the actual enterprise.
The cost to the neighbors is no longer theoretical. Karen Wallace, a twenty-two-year resident of Hallock Lane next to the Harbes operation in Mattituck, told The Suffolk Times in 2021 that the property had shifted “from greenhouses [and] small farm stands, to this entertainment complex that it’s now become.” The Department of Agriculture and Markets’s own subsequent review found that several of Harbes’s attractions (Farmer’s Foosball, Duck Race Games, Spider Web Climber) did not appear to promote on-farm sales or enhance the public’s understanding of farming, which is the statutory predicate for the protection. The findings were advisory. The complex continues.
Vineyard 48 in Cutchogue was the case that drew blood. A July 2015 limousine crash leaving the winery killed Brittney Schulman, 23, Lauren Baruch, 24, Stephanie Belli, 23, and Amy Grabina, 23, at an intersection longtime Cutchogue resident Bill Shipman had been raising at town board meetings for years. The State Liquor Authority emergency-suspended the winery in October 2017 after documenting what it called a “disturbing record of repeatedly serving patrons far beyond the point of extreme intoxication,” including an estimated 400 disorderly patrons on a single September 2017 afternoon. The winery shut down within weeks. The protections under which it had operated for years did not.
Property values are no longer theoretical either. The Fayette homeowners on Abbott Drive told the Finger Lakes Times last November that four summers of late-night music at Seneca Ridge, a 2022 wedding venue over Seneca Lake, had hurt the resale value of their houses. Clarkstown’s June 2024 zoning amendment now requires any new agritourism operation to sit on at least seven acres, with 100 feet of state or county road frontage, a 200-foot buffer from any neighboring residence, and at least 51 percent of the land in active agricultural use. In Orangetown, State Supreme Court Justice Thomas Zugibe ruled in September 2025 that Rockland Cider Works constituted a private nuisance and awarded the neighbors monetary damages. The cidery had filed counterclaims against two of its own neighbors for defamation, trespass, and intentional infliction of emotional distress. Zugibe dismissed the counterclaims a month later under the state’s strengthened anti-SLAPP statute and ordered the cidery to pay the neighbors’ legal fees. The threat of being sued by your own town’s winery, cidery, or distillery is now a routine cost of public comment at a Hudson Valley planning meeting.
In Gardiner, in October 2018, the town’s attorney Dave Brennan warned the planning board that a proposed agricultural conservation easement on a 54-acre parcel next to the Heartwood eco-resort amounted to “a Great Escape for Agriculture.” The town’s planning consultant Jim Freiband put it more plainly at the same meeting: “Agricultural practices are exempt from zoning. You do not have authority over them.” Heartwood (a 70-cabin resort with a spa, a restaurant, and an event space, operated as Shinrin Yoku, LLC by Phillip and Kristin Rapoport of Manhattan) received conditional planning-board approval three months later. The Article 78 challenge filed by Friends of Gardiner was dismissed by Justice Gilpatric in January 2020. Eco-resorts now run on Article 25-AA too.
The municipal accounting is the other half of the inversion. The Suffolk County sales tax (4.375 percent county plus a 0.375-percent regional surcharge) captures the bulk of the wedding-receipt revenue at the county level. The four-percent state portion goes to Albany. The town, which absorbs the actual costs, receives nothing of it. Property taxes, the only town-level revenue that scales with the venue’s footprint, are suppressed by the Section 305(1) agricultural assessment and the Section 483 ten-year exemption on new farm buildings. The undertaxed parcel runs party buses down a road engineered for tractor traffic. Southold’s police made weekend runs to Vineyard 48 for the better part of a decade. The Town of Warwick has logged more than 130 police incidents at Blue Arrow Farm between 2019 and the present. Volunteer fire and EMS (which is what most of rural New York actually runs on) absorb the medical-call volume from the receptions.
The pattern is a near-total inversion of the statute’s stated purpose. The right-to-farm protections written to defend the dairy farmer are now the legal vehicle for outbidding him. The municipal-services bill is paid by the residents next door. The sales-tax receipts flow to the county and to Albany. The property-tax base of the parcel itself is suppressed by an exemption designed for a working dairy. The residential homeowners who voted for the statute in the 1970s have been alienated, parcel by parcel, by the experience of living next to what the statute now permits. Real agricultural production in New York has lost ground continuously for fifty years. Article 25-AA was sold as the policy that would defend it. It is funding its replacement.
Williams and Collins want Chatham to accept that 509 Bashford Road is going to be the exception. That this vineyard, this tasting room, this set of applications, will produce something other than the outcome every comparable case in New York has produced. They have not made the case. The detailed plans the Planning Board repeatedly requested have not been produced. The Supervisor’s business arrangement with the applicant went undisclosed for years. The procedural path that folded the parcel into Agricultural District 10 ran on a public-notice regime almost no one in northern Columbia County actually reads. The record, what there is of it, looks nothing like a farming application and exactly like a vanity-vineyard one.
Two readings of Donal Collins’s position on Fox Hill are available. The first is that he is, after a decade of state-level precedent, the most uninformed town supervisor in New York. The second is that he is perfectly well informed and has elected, on account of his undisclosed arrangement with the Williamses, not to act on what he knows. The third reading (both are true, and Collins is simultaneously in over his head and in business with the applicant) is the one the evidence most comfortably supports.
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Sources
Statewide farm and farmland loss figures (2,788 farms, 363,885 acres, ~1,900 dairy farms, 40-percent dairy farm count reduction, 2017-2022): 2022 USDA Census of Agriculture; New York Farm Bureau; New York State Comptroller’s “Profile of Agriculture in New York State,” November 2024.
Article 25-AA, Sections 305(1), 305-a, 301(11) of the New York Agriculture and Markets Law; Section 483 of the Real Property Tax Law; 2017 Department of Agriculture and Markets guidance memo on farm wineries, breweries, cideries, and distilleries: statutory and regulatory text.
Maddie Morley and Benjamin Roberts: Debra Kamin, “Wealthy New Yorkers Are Driving Up Prices, but Hudson Valley Farmland Is Worse Than Most Markets,” New York Times, June 2022.
Sarah Kingzack and Gabriela Pereyra: Audrea Lim, “Beginning Farmers, Farmers of Color Outbid as Farmland Prices Soar,” Civil Eats, January 3, 2022.
American Farmland Trust New York Farmland Access Fund: AFT website (farmland.org).
Long Island vineyard ownership (Frankel, Abrams, Soloviev, Rivero-González, Bedell, Castello di Borghese, Cutchogue 147-acre): The Real Deal, “Vineyard Vision,” July 2021; The Long Island Local, “Some Changes for North Fork Wineries,” April 2021; The Real Deal coverage of Cutchogue listing, June 2019.
Marianne Collins quote: New York Post, 2018, via The Real Deal, June 2019.
Syma Gerard quote: Carrie Miller, “Do you dream of buying a winery? Here’s what you need to know,” Northforker, August 2014.
The Henson hotel and Franko family pattern: Hudson Valley Magazine, August 2025.
Catskill Farms: Hudson Valley Magazine, May 2023.
Winners Circle Winery, Malta: Town of Malta Planning Board submissions, 2022-2024.
Karen Wallace quote and Department of Agriculture and Markets review of Harbes: Tara Smith, “Neighbor’s complaints puts Harbes under scrutiny of NY State Liquor Authority,” The Suffolk Times, September 28, 2021.
Vineyard 48 emergency suspension, SLA characterization, 400-patron estimate, and limo-crash details (including Bill Shipman’s history of complaints): New York State Liquor Authority press release, October 2017; The Suffolk Times, Associated Press, North Fork Patch (2024 anniversary coverage).
Town attorney Dave Brennan (“Great Escape for Agriculture”) and planning consultant Jim Freiband: Frances Marion Platt, “Gardiner puts brakes on agritourism operation next to proposed resort,” Hudson Valley One, October 30, 2018.
Heartwood approval and Friends of Gardiner Article 78 dismissal: Hudson Valley One, January 2019 and February 2020 coverage.
Fayette / Seneca Ridge: Steve Buchiere, “Wedding venue, Abbott Drive neighbors in Fayette at odds over new proposal,” Finger Lakes Times, November 16, 2025.
Clarkstown June 2024 zoning amendment: Tina Traster, Rockland County Business Journal, June 26, 2024.
Rockland Cider Works (private nuisance ruling, anti-SLAPP dismissal of counterclaims, attorneys’ fees award): Tina Traster, Rockland County Business Journal, October 13, 2025; Feerick Nugent MacCartney PLLC case summary on McWhinney v. Rockland Cider Works.
Suffolk County sales tax: New York State Department of Taxation and Finance, effective March 1, 2025.
Blue Arrow Farm, Warwick: Daily Voice, April 2026; Hudson Valley Country, April 2026.