The Wine Wars: Oh Cherie! Cattle? Seriously?
The tune playing in the Hudson Valley isn't Steve Perry - but it's been a Journey
It seems that in more recent times America has developed almost an appetite for corruption — a certain tolerance for grift and a reverence for the rich. Toss in characters whose colors and flaws seem plagiarized from Tennessee Williams’ diary: A plastic surgeon and a wife named after a fortified wine, replete with a French twist. A northeast farmer with a Tulane education and the ethics of a bayou politician. A well-meaning collection of town elders who seem perplexed by a growing chorus of discontent from the townsfolk. Indeed, it seems almost literary. But it’s not a literary work; it’s real life. And maybe Chatham never had an appetite for any of this — maybe, just maybe, they had a tolerance. It could be that a desire to be neighborly was mistaken for something else. This could be less Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and more To Kill a Mockingbird, where true justice proves more durable than Big Daddy.
Justice has a biblical tone to it, doesn’t it? But strip away the Johns, Pauls, and the story of all the world’s creatures on a precursor to a Carnival Cruise, and justice becomes less abstract. It’s measured on a scale of laws: ones you abide by or the ones you break. Like a game of Jenga, the Williams have continued to pull out pieces of the legal tower to win the game, but now it’s worth looking at whether they have brought down the high-rise with their need to win.
Indeed, Team Williams — and it does look like a team — have done a lot to win their coveted wedding venue. But was it clever, or was it simply breaking the law? If they broke the law, or bent it out of shape, if team members violated their ethical obligations, then the question becomes: how effective are the local powers that be in protecting the land and its citizens? Or will it take a judge?
You can compare their approach to the Planning Board, the ZBA, the Building Department and the County to a child who, denied screen time by Mommy, goes padding off to find Daddy. But here’s the thing: it’s not just that. What the Williams and their lawyers might have been doing actually has a name. It’s called “segmentation”, and it is illegal. I’ll get to that, and I’ll explain precisely why this whole affair is looking the way it’s looking. But before we dive into the deep end of the legal pool, let’s linger for a moment in the shallow end.
A Form Full of Something from a Bull, but no Cows in Sight
What exactly do you call it when someone lies on a government form, signs it, and submits it? I want to be specific. I’m talking about the 303-b application, the form filed to move a property into an agricultural district in Columbia County.
NY Penal Law § 175.30 — Offering a False Instrument for Filing in the Second Degree, which covers knowingly presenting a written instrument containing false information to a public office, with the expectation it will become part of the official record: a Class A misdemeanor. § 175.35 takes it further, to the First Degree, when that same act is carried out with intent to defraud the state or any political subdivision: a Class E felony.
Submitting one that contains false information? That’s considerably more than losing screen time for the weekend.
Last October, Cherie Williams filed her application to legitimize Fox Hill Vineyard as a real farm — Pinocchio fashion. Like much of what the Williams have “created,” the document had a familiar flair for invention. I know this because I have a copy of the signed and submitted application — the entire packet, obtained without a FOIL request. The County’s own Resolution 70-2026 required them to post it publicly, and they didn’t. A gentle nudge was all it took to get it emailed to me.
Now don’t jump to the conclusion that the packet was complete. Missing is a memo from the Agriculture and Farmland Protection Board stating its rationale for finding no environmental impact — a document that was supposed to be included. Coincidence? I don’t think so. Anything bearing Collins’s stamp tends to require something close to surgery to extract. The file itself, however, was illuminating.
There in all its PDF glory is document 303-b asking for inclusion into Agriculture District 10. It was filled out and signed by Cherie Williams, not Edwin. He doesn’t own the land, she does. This is not unusual – a lot of surgeons do this to protect their home – the wife is a safe harbor in stormy malpractice seas.
The numbers on the form read with the serene confidence of someone who never expected to be fact-checked: Total Acres of all parcel(s) to be included: 53.70. Total Acres Used for Agricultural Purposes: 51.7. No Cherie, no. A third of that land is woods and wetlands, the kind of quietly lovely, thoroughly unfarmed terrain that produces nothing more agricultural than atmosphere. The Williams are already pocketing a full tax exemption, courtesy of Donal Collins rolling up some hay bales on their behalf. The real number isn’t 51.7 acres of agricultural productivity. It’s closer to 5.17, a decimal point that somehow migrated rightward, taking the truth with it.
Tax minimization is, of course, a sport played enthusiastically across the social spectrum, from Park Avenue to the rural counties. One barely raises an eyebrow. But the creativity on display in Part 2 of the application is something else entirely — a work of pastoral fiction so ambitious it practically demands its own imprint.
Cherie Williams describes the property as “presently cleared of trees and primarily utilized for beef cattle operations,” managed by “Local Farmer Dunn Collins of Chatham, NY” for “grazing beef cattle and harvesting hay.” It reads like a brochure for an agritourism destination, doesn’t it. The only problem (and it is rather a significant one) is that there have never been cattle on this land during the Williams’s tenure. Nope, not a one. There hasn’t been a head of cattle on that land since I was a boy living down the road over 50 years ago. There is no fencing. The cattle exist exclusively on the form, which is to say, they do not exist at all. Not at 509 Bashford Road and that is the land at issue.
It’s Part 3 where the application really begins to unspool. Filed in October 2025, it claims 200 vines, not the 400 cited in the application submitted to the town of Chatham, and certainly not the 5,000 the Williams claimed to be planning in their December 5th, 2025 email to me. Numbers, it seems, are treated as suggestions in the Fox Hill universe, fluid and negotiable depending on the audience. An honest survey of the property tells a different story: roughly 20 acres consumed by house, woods, solar infrastructure, and wetlands. The credible agricultural footprint is somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 acres, not 51, not 53, not whatever figure best serves the application of the moment.
And then there is the matter of Old MacDonal who has no farm on Bashford Road. Donal Collins. Dunn Collins. Supervisor Collins. The Town Supervisor of the very municipality where all of this is unfolding, a detail that the form, in its chatty way, attempts to obfuscate or implicate. It is hard to tell. His dual role as both the agricultural steward of Fox Hill and the elected head of town government has been, to put it gently, a topic of animated private conversation — both in Hudson and Chatham. The question of who knew what and when about 509 Bashford Road’s ambitions has circulated at the level of knowing glances and careful phrasing. And a few questions continue to simmer. When did the town of Chatham know? Did they have an obligation to know? Was the County required to notify them before waving the property into Agricultural District 10?
Some members of the town board have apparently been genuinely uncertain on this last point, wondering aloud whether the notification obligation truly fell to the County and whether anyone in Chatham actually received it. The investigative rigor on display would not have taxed Nancy Drew or the Hardy Boys — separate or sleuthing together.
The answer, it turns out, is printed right in Part 5 of the very application that Mrs. Williams — like Cher, only Cherie — signed, in language admirably free of ambiguity: “I further understand that all applications will be forwarded to the local municipality for comments.”
The form knew. And now, so does everyone else. If it is unclear to some readers let me make it plain: it became “town” business when the “town” was asked to comment.
Which brings us, with the inevitability of a bad renovation that keeps requiring new permits, to what this form and the attorney’s letter that followed it three months later actually prove when you set them side by side. Because the beauty of these two documents, read together rather than in the comfortable isolation each was designed for, is that they corroborate something with almost theatrical clarity. Something more significant than Cherie’s big little lies, they corroborate segmentation.
Segmentation: The Strategy That Breaks the Law
The State Environmental Quality Review Act (SEQRA), is New York’s primary environmental law. Before any government agency approves an action, it must first assess that action’s potential environmental impact. Full disclosure. Full review. Informed decision-making. The whole point is to look before you leap. It is, in other words, the precise opposite of what has been happening at 509 Bashford Road.
Segmentation is how applicants like the Williams try to game that system. The rule under SEQRA is that a project must be reviewed in its entirety. You cannot break a large, interconnected undertaking into smaller pieces and review each piece in isolation, as if the other pieces didn’t exist or weren’t planned. The regulations are unambiguous on this point. It is prohibited under 6 NYCRR § 617.3(g). Not discouraged. Not frowned upon. Prohibited.
The classic move goes like this. Rather than presenting a complete vision to a single reviewing body, applicants advance a project incrementally, across different phases, before different municipalities and agencies, over time. What begins as one modest application becomes, years later, something considerably different and often larger than any single board was ever asked to evaluate. Each body sees only what is in front of it at that moment. None is positioned to assess what the pieces add up to. The reviewing agency, seeing only the slice in front of it, sees nothing alarming and approves. Then the next slice. Then the next. Eventually a full project materializes, assembled from approvals that were each individually waved through without anyone ever reviewing what they added up to. The frog, as they say, does not notice the water heating.
Now look at the 303-b application. Filed in October 2025, it asks Columbia County to include 509 Bashford Road in Agricultural District 10. On its face it describes a modest farming operation: some hay, some cattle (phantom cattle, as we’ve established) and 200 vines (not 400 or 5000 according to Dr. Williams himself) on a fraction of an acre (not 51). The language is quietly bucolic. Nothing about this filing, reviewed on its own merits by the County Agricultural and Farmland Protection Board, announces itself as the opening legal maneuver in a campaign to establish a commercial venue.
But buried in Part III is a sentence that rather gives the game away. The applicant describes the long-term intention as expanding the vineyard over the next four years, with rows mapped across the hillside in a “progressive planting strategy” designed to maximize sunlight, drainage, and air circulation for “premium grape production.” The scale of that ambition was made explicit by Dr. Williams himself in his December 5, 2025 email, where he disclosed the target of 5,000 vines — along with, for good measure, his farming expertise and his attention to following the law. Five thousand vines is not 200 any more than a garage is a tasting room. But this, the 5000, is nowhere to be found in the application process.
There is also the matter of proposed use and municipal permits/approvals required to establish this use, which the form specifically asks for. The answer filed: “The future plans for the property include expansion of the vineyard with the addition of a tasting room which was determined to be a permitted use by the Town of Chatham CEO.” The tasting room is disclosed, yes. The fact that there is no licensed winery nor a permit to sell wine? A disclosure that the tasting room approval was in active dispute, already the subject of a neighbor’s appeal, before the application was voted on — those are nowhere to be found. They exist with the grazing cows. The County board reviewing the 303-b sees a farm seeking agricultural district protection. It does not see a commercial winery seeking regulatory cover. It does not see the scope. It does not see the ongoing litigation. And remember, Donal Collins’s big lift was recusal — and only after the horse was out of the barn (and no, there are no horses on 509 Bashford either).
Then comes Lawrence Howard’s January 2026 letter to the Zoning Board of Appeals, which performs the opposite narrowing trick with equal elegance. Where the 303-b quietly buries the commercial ambitions beneath the pastoral language of fictional beef cattle and a one-man hay harvest, the Howard letter minimizes the tasting room until it is barely a whisper of an action. The proposal, the letter informs us, is limited to “the interior modification of an existing garage and the expansion of the parking area to accommodate around eight vehicles.” Gatherings of 15 to 20 people, no more than fifteen times per year, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. only. Nothing to see here. Note to YELP: sedans and minivans only.
And then the keystone argument: no site plan review required, because the tasting room is simply permitted as accessory use. This matters enormously. Site plan review is the mechanism through which SEQRA environmental review is typically triggered for projects of this kind. If the attorney can persuade the ZBA that the tasting room is an as-of-right agricultural use requiring no site plan review, then no SEQRA review ever gets conducted, not for the tasting room, not for the parking, not for the 5,000-vine expansion, not for whatever phase follows. The legal architecture depends entirely on keeping each piece below the threshold that would require the whole to be examined.
Place the two documents side by side and what emerges is a project that neither filing has fully disclosed to the body reviewing it. A 53-acre property in Chatham is being systematically repositioned from residential-agricultural to a functioning commercial winery: tasting room, expanded parking, 5,000-vine long-term plan, gatherings of up to 20 people fifteen times a year, and future phases presumably to follow. That project, reviewed honestly as a whole by any single body with SEQRA obligations, would require a coordinated environmental assessment: traffic, noise, drainage, water use, impacts on neighboring properties, cumulative effects across all phases.
Instead, the County is asked to consider only whether an over-estimated 51 acres of land should be included in an agricultural district. The Town ZBA is asked to consider only whether a garage conversion is an as-of-right accessory use. No single agency has been asked, or apparently permitted, to consider all of it together. That is not an accident. That is the strategy.
The applications are not independent. The agricultural district status obtained through the 303-b strengthens the argument that the tasting room is an agricultural use. The tasting room, once approved, anchors the case for the vineyard expansion. The vineyard expansion justifies the agricultural district inclusion. Each piece depends on the others. They were planned together and are being approved separately, which is, with the concision that legal language occasionally achieves, the definition of an impermissibly segmented project under SEQRA.
The Howard letter even inadvertently confirms the interdependence when it argues that wine production is an agricultural use regardless of where the grapes are processed. That argument only needs to be made if you are anticipating a scale of operation where the question becomes legally relevant. A farm stand selling jam does not require a three-page brief on the agricultural nature of off-site processing.
Courts in New York have consistently held that related actions must be reviewed together when they are part of a single plan, or when the approval of one is contingent on or connected to the approval of others. The test is not whether the applications were filed separately. The test is whether they are functionally interdependent pieces of a larger whole. The 303-b application’s own disclosure of the 4 year expansion plan makes it very difficult to argue otherwise. You cannot claim two actions are unrelated when one of them describes the future the other is designed to enable.
The mosaic has been assembled one tile at a time, with each tile presented to a different set of eyes. But the picture has been visible from the beginning, to anyone willing to look at all the tiles at once.
And the fragmentation of review is only part of the problem. Because a process this carefully constructed to avoid scrutiny depends on one additional condition: that the public never gets a clear look at any of it. As it turns out, that condition has been well maintained.
This has been going on for over six years. Six years of shifting numbers, phantom cattle, and boards and offices handed single pieces of a puzzle that only makes sense whole. Six years during which the applicants have claimed, depending on the audience, everything from a modest hobby vineyard to a full commercial venue with tastings, weddings, and five thousand vines. And at least three of those years with Donal Collins — the Town Supervisor with an undisclosed relationship to the property — sitting at the head of the table while questions of notice, comment, and approval circulated beneath him like a current he preferred not to name.
And through all of it, there remains yet another structural failure that has operated in quiet service of the same outcome: the question of public notice.
The Notice That Notified Almost No One
At a recent Chatham Town Board meeting, Supervisor Collins offered what passed for a moment of transparency — or perhaps merely a deflection from the fact that he had shared none of this with the community or his board, as required by Resolution 72-24 (if you don’t know about Resolution 72-24 you can read it here). The county, he mentioned, was reviewing its notice policies. Expensive, he said. Questionable efficacy. It was the kind of offhand remark that invites no follow-up. But the efficacy, it turns out, is worth examining in some detail.
There is a legal requirement, before a property can be waved into an Agricultural District, that the public be notified. A hearing must be announced. The community must have the opportunity to weigh in. This is not a courtesy. It is the law. And in Columbia County, that legal obligation is discharged through publication in the local newspaper of record, the Columbia County Register Star.
Here is what that means in practice.
I reached out to the Register Star directly and communicated with a woman named Rhona. What she shared was instructive. The paper prints 4,600 copies total, distributed between Greene and Columbia Counties. Sixty percent, 2,760 copies, go to Columbia County. Of those, she told me, the majority stay in the city of Hudson.
So let’s be generous. Let’s say Hudson absorbs roughly half the Columbia County run, call it 1,400 copies, and the remaining 1,360 are distributed across the eighteen towns by household.
Chatham’s households number roughly 1,640, about 7.6 percent of the combined household count across those eighteen towns. Apply that share to 1,360 remaining papers and Chatham receives, at most, about 103 copies.
One hundred and three newspapers. For a town of four thousand people.
That is 2.5 percent of Chatham’s population, and that was the generous version. The real number, once you account for what actually stays in Hudson, is smaller still. We are now talking about a town being legally notified through a document that reached, on the most charitable arithmetic available, roughly 2.5 percent of its residents.
The notice was published, the box was ticked, and the hearing was announced — in the technical sense of the word. But whether anyone in Chatham actually saw it, understood that 509 Bashford Road was about to be folded into Agricultural District 10, or grasped what that inclusion was meant to enable, was another matter entirely. The 97.5 percent of town residents who never received a copy were left, as with so much in this affair, in the dark.
Supervisor Collins was right about one thing: the efficacy is questionable. What he did not mention is that a notice that reaches almost no one is not a flaw in this application — it is a feature of it. Segmented review, captured oversight, a public notice regime that functions as formality rather than genuine mechanism of public awareness: these are not separate failures that happened to coincide. They are the architecture. Each reinforces the others. Each depends on the others. And it is precisely what Collins, the Williams, and their lawyers have depended on from the beginning.
So here is where the Jenga tower lands. Not on the Williams. Not on the supervisor who somehow managed to be both the town’s elected steward and the man with an undisclosed business relationship with the very people whose application he was overseeing. It lands, as it always does in these arrangements, on the people who were never invited to the table — the residents of Chatham and Columbia County, whose tax dollars will now fund the legal defense of a flawed process engineered to benefit two people pursuing a vanity vineyard and a party venue, secretly shepherded through by a supervisor with a documented history of sidelining his fellow board members and a personal stake in the outcome.
Both municipalities are already late on their FOIL responses. That is not a footnote. Under New York law, that lateness is a constructive denial, and it means that any citizen with standing can walk into Supreme Court today and file an Article 78 proceeding to compel production — with attorney’s fees attached. The taxpayers of Chatham will pay those fees. The taxpayers of Columbia County will pay those fees. Donal Collins, depending on what a court makes of his rather remarkable arrangement — a town supervisor with an undisclosed connection to a property whose approvals repeatedly crossed his desk — may find that his official title offers less protection than he has assumed.
The legal exposure is real and it is layered: a potentially false instrument filed with the county, a SEQRA process that was never conducted, a notice regime that reached 2.5 percent of the town it was meant to inform, an administrative record missing its own required environmental justification, and a six-year segmentation strategy that New York courts have consistently refused to excuse regardless of how elegantly it was assembled.
But strip away the statutes and the case citations and what you have is simpler and older than any of it. A community’s trust was exploited.
Not that it matters to Dr. Williams. He made his position clear: he “doesn’t give a f*ck about what the neighbors think.” It is, in retrospect, the Rosetta Stone of this entire affair. A man that indifferent to the people around him doesn’t lose much sleep over what he tells them — or the boards that represent them, or the forms that require the truth under penalty of law. Indifference to people and indifference to facts travel together. They always have.
That indifference may yet prove more costly than any filing error or procedural overreach. Because Chatham was paying attention. The neighbors do give a f*ck. And so, as it turns out, do certain government agencies — think the NYS Comptroller, and yes, maybe even the Chatham Town Board.
This may not be the Bravo TV ending Ed and Cherie Williams wrote for themselves. But Chatham may yet get its To Kill a Mockingbird moment. True justice, as that title reminds us, has a way of being more durable than Big Daddy. Or, in this case, Donal.
Note: At the time of publication, the Town of Chatham had requested a six-day extension on the outstanding FOIL request; Columbia County indicated it was working on its response but offered no firm delivery date. They remain out of legal compliance (not that I’ll sue). The Chatham Town Board, the Planning Board, and the Zoning Board of Appeals, as well as the Columbia County Chairman, were each contacted for comment on multiple occasions. None responded.
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