The Wine Wars: The Lawyer Brought the Fertilizer to the Zoning Board of Appeals
Last night the ZBA dealt Fox Hill another blow. But first, a word about the town’s troubled relationship with transparency.
Last night’s ZBA meeting was, once again, a bruising evening for the Williams and the tasting room they so badly want. We will get to the bodies. They are still warm. But first, transparency, that civic virtue the Town of Chatham keeps promising and keeps misplacing.
Board member Lisa Semenetti has been pushing for it. Earnestly. And yet the person whose job it is to post the relevant correspondence before a meeting, a duty the town’s own website advertises with a straight face, simply did not get around to it. I cannot tell you why. I can tell you that I got the letters, scanned them, and loaded them last week. Perhaps the worker bees at Town Hall are logging too many hours on Facebook. Perhaps they couldn’t locate the documents. It is, after all, very hard to find anything when your head is parked up the supervisor’s backside.
So, thanks to that lapse, the room sat in obedient silence while Joel Howard, attorney for the Williamses, got caught up on the matter. The opposition’s letters first (Mitchell Khosrova, writing for the neighbor Susan Tanner whose appeal started all of this, and Mark Sweeney, the late and elegant arrival representing Jeffrey Murdock and Regina Wenzek), and then the Williams’ own quasi-appeal, the one I have called illegitimate and see no reason to stop calling illegitimate.
Then came the one-two punch.
The first jab was the appeal’s central conceit: that it rests on new information. The new information, we were told, is that the Williamses are now inside an agricultural district. Anyone who reads this column knows better. The Williamses applied to join Ag District 10 back in October. It was quiet. It was, by any fair reading, secret. New, it was not. You cannot stage a fact in the wings for half a year and then walk it onstage as a surprise witness.
From there Howard prattled on about agricultural bona fides, the inclusion in District 10 offered up like a passport at customs, before drifting into a faintly threatening little aside about how New York State Ag and Markets understands that tasting rooms are essential to selling wine for legitimate farms. He then complained that he had not been given the chance to address the board, which is a curious grievance, because he had been given the chance, and he had taken it, in writing. The wedding business, he assured everyone, was old news and largely misinformation. This is just farming, folks. A few friends over to swirl and sip.
What he did not address is more telling than what he did.
He did not address the fiction on the Williamses 303-b application. The one with the phantom cows on the property that don’t need fencing and graze no fields. He did not address the barn complex that exists on paper and nowhere else. He did not address the formal agricultural education that, on inspection, never happened. He did not explain why, after the ZBA (the town’s appellate body) rejected the tasting room application, he failed to do the thing any ordinary lawyer would do, which is file an Article 78 proceeding in State Supreme Court within the thirty days the law allows. And there was no accounting at all for what increasingly resembles segmentation rather than a real plan, the kind of plan that goes to the Planning Board complete with building drawings, vineyard acreage, traffic studies, and an honest reckoning of what fungicide and runoff do to a shared aquifer.
The way he spoke about Fox Hill Estate and Vineyard you’d think he was describing Archer Daniels Midland. Maybe he doesn’t know that less than one percent of the Williams’ 53 acre property is given over to grapes for this much-needed tasting room. The rest is mansion. And the “farmers” (I kid you not, that is how the Williamses were described), by all appearances, spend their working hours manufacturing Mar-a-Lago faces, not wine.
Howard really didn't have a legal argument. I'd call it a soliloquy if I were in a generous mood, but accurately, it was the verbal equivalent of what the Omms spread on their fields - crap. But he showed a few cards, including a willingness to go to Ag and Markets. They often overrule bodies like the ZBA when it comes to farmers having retail establishments to sell their wares. Of course. We all saw this coming.
Let also remember why this appeal exists at all. It exists because the Williamses skipped the Planning Board entirely and walked their tasting room straight into the building department, the municipal equivalent of slipping in through the kitchen.
But rules, like the fence around a pool, are apparently for other people. As Orwell put it, all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.
Cue the peanut gallery (Abi, Prue and the rest Collins’ fans in the echo chamber aka Facebook).
Oh, I almost forgot. Abi, the woman with the temperament of a raccoon with rabies, mentioned that she and Donal had had their lease with the Williamses for years before they were elected into office. So just why can't this financial relationship between the Williamses and the town supervisor be disclosed? And before the Collins' pep rally, let's remember that this debacle is not free. It's taking people's time and money - both citizens and town workers. All related to a town supervisor who has not been candid about his relationship with the Williamses and lack of transparency when it came to them going to the county to enter the manse into an ag district. And of course the Williamses, who have refused to cooperate with the Planning Board.
Ah, transparency. Tell us more about this virtue Ms. Shaw.
Independent journalism answers to readers—not advertisers, corporations, or access-hungry editors. No story gets killed because it upsets a sponsor. No punch gets pulled because someone important made a phone call.
Your support makes possible sharp commentary, fearless satire, and reporting that follows the story wherever it leads. In an era of manufactured narratives and algorithmic blandness, that independence isn’t a luxury—it’s a necessity.
Subscribe to The Powell House Press. Or settle for content that tells you what someone else wants you to hear.
©2026 All Rights Reserved | The Powell House Press | josh@thepowellhousepress.com.