Over a Barrel , livre ebook

OVER A BARREL
Taylor Family 1909.
In front, Greyton; seated, Addie and Walter; back row, left to right, Fred, Lucy, Flora, Clarence.
(Photo Credit: Dinah Hoyt Taylor)
OVER A BARREL
The Rise and Fall of New York’s
TAYLOR WINE COMPANY
T HOMAS P ELLECHIA

AN IMPRINT OF STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK PRESS
Published by
S TATE U NIVERSITY OF N EW Y ORK P RESS , A LBANY
© 2015 Thomas Pellechia
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
EXCELSIOR EDITIONS
IS AN IMPRINT OF S TATE U NIVERSITY OF N EW Y ORK P RESS
For information, contact
State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Production, Laurie D. Searl
Marketing, Fran Keneston
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Pellechia, Thomas, 1945–
Over a barrel : the rise and fall of New York’s Taylor Wine Company / Thomas Pellechia.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-5549-5 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-4384-5551-8 (ebook)
1. Taylor Wine Company—History. 2. Wine industry—New York (State)—History. I. Title.
HD9379.T39P45 2015 338.7'6632009747—dc23 2014014919
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER ONE
Arrivals
CHAPTER TWO
War and Prohibition
CHAPTER THREE
Rebirth
CHAPTER FOUR
The Rise
CHAPTER FIVE
The Competition
CHAPTER SIX
Successful Choices
photo gallery
CHAPTER SEVEN
Expansion
CHAPTER EIGHT
Offspring
CHAPTER NINE
Trouble Ahead
CHAPTER TEN
The Big Leagues
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Fraying
CHAPTER TWELVE
Unraveling
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The Fall
EPILOGUE
REFERENCES
INDEX
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Facts are facts, and they are objective, too. The truth is not so easy, as it coyly resides between facts and the subjective perceptions of those involved. Anyone who has served on a jury or spent many years as a journalist surely understands that when telling a “true” story the best an author can expect is to assemble the facts, write them down, then let the readers decide. The important thing is to explore what happened and why things happened, not to place blame for the way things turned out but so that others might benefit from lessons learned.
When compiling the facts, the task of chronicling the history of a company can be as daunting as uncovering the truth. Still, dogged ferreting can bring facts to the surface. To help me ferret, I am forever indebted to remaining Taylor family members who agreed to speak with me: Dinah Hoyt Taylor, Ellen Jane Taylor, and Ann (Taylor) Van Rosevelt, granddaughters of the Taylor Wine Company’s founder, plus Ellen Jane’s daughter Muriel. Thanks also goes to the research libraries, museums, and the public records and clerks of towns, counties, and courthouses, each of which is recognized by name at the back of the book.
Additional thanks to the past Coca-Cola and Taylor Wine Company employees and executives who spoke with me, as well as others in the grape and wine industry and in politics who agreed to an interview; their names appear at the end of this book. Out of about forty-five people on the list a few were either no longer with us or simply did not respond to requests for interview. Only two people said no to an interview. In all, more than thirty people agreed to be interviewed spanning the East, West, and South sections of the United States. Three interviews were completed via e-mail; the rest were digitally recorded either in person or by prior agreement over the telephone.
Finally, special thanks to Anne Elizabeth Kiley-Pellechia, for her effort to make sure that the author made sense.
PROLOGUE

For nearly 150 years, starting in 1860, the small Village of Hammondsport served as the capital of New York’s Finger Lakes wine industry. Positioned at the southern end of Keuka Lake, Hammondsport lies just west of the center of the Finger Lakes region, a group of eleven long thin lakes and surrounding countryside approximately nine thousand square miles in size.
Hammondsport is a quiet, photogenic village, with lakeside cottages, a small beach, and a view north up the length of the lake. The village proper is graced with Victorian-era homes, preserved storefronts, and an old-fashioned village square that is, along with a number of lookalike town squares in New York State, rumored to have been the one that the movie director Frank Capra used as a model for Bedford Falls, the upstate New York town depicted in his 1946 Christmas classic It’s a Wonderful Life.
In the spring of 1995, nearly fifty years after Capra’s movie, an independent movie production team moved into Hammondsport. The team was there for neither beauty shots nor a Christmas story; filming was to begin for an independent film called Dadetown, in a genre known as “mockumentary,” which is fiction presented in nonfiction form. The twentysomething Dadetown writers, John Housley and Russ Hexter—who was also the director—created what has become a cult classic. It tells a story of what happens to a company town when the company shuts down and a concurrent rise in upscale development threatens to replace the town’s culture and values.
At about the time filming began, a massive employee layoff was indeed taking place at the Taylor Wine Company, the community’s largest employer and the company that made Hammondsport a real-life company town. It was the end of what had been an important engine of the local economy and once the largest successful wine company in the American Northeast. Dadetown director Hexter worried that the layoffs were too close to the bone for the locals that he had hired as actors in his movie; he figured they would drop out of the project. He was wrong. Trained as well as untrained local actors used their work in the movie as a cathartic release of their feelings about what had been happening in Hammondsport over the previous decade: the loss of acres of vineyards that for generations had surrounded Keuka Lake, and the threat to a few hundred families whose livelihoods were historically in the hands of the once benevolent giant wine company, which had begun in the late nineteenth century as a table grape business and grape juice plant and by the late twentieth century was one of the top ten largest American domestic wineries.
Established in 1880 by Walter Taylor, who ran it until soon after the turn of the century, the company remained in the family and was operated by the second generation of Taylors until the company went public eight decades later. Walter’s sons Fred, Clarence, and Greyton shared executive positions. Their two sisters, Flora and Lucy, were equal partners in the business but did not share executive control; the custom of the period was that a woman’s primary job was to marry well. Each brother brought to the company separate and personal business talents, but when it came to temperament, the brothers were distinct. Fred, the oldest, held his cards close to his chest, spoke only when necessary, envied creative people, and in later life loved to flaunt his wealth. The middle brother, Clarence, grew into a persnickety person hardly ever seen without jacket and tie even at home, at family gatherings, or at the company picnic. Greyton, the youngest, had the most expansive personality. At first less interested in becoming part of the family business than he was in developing his many talents and sensibilities, Greyton explored horticulture, art, and the violin; gregarious and charismatic, he also dabbled in politics.
Like all families, the Taylors were not always perfectly in step with one another. Greyton’s flamboyant personality produced friction with Fred; Clarence’s rigidity kept him distant; and when the sisters married, the brothers generally disliked their brothers-in-law, whom they suspected of golddigging. The family expanded over the years, adding nieces and nephews and then their husbands and wives. The Taylors liked to keep the business in the family, but the addition of more interlinked personalities into the business resulted in jealousies, slights, disagreements, and overall dysfunction. According to Greyton’s daughter Ellen Jane and her younger sister Dinah, the fact that a thread of bipolar disease ran through successive Taylor generations didn’t make matters any better. The malady afflicted one of their aunts, their brother, and a few of their nieces and nephews.
The Taylor family business first capitalized on the connections of Walter’s father George, who ran a cooperage business, and second, from the Taylor family’s work ethic, sales talent, innovation, and good promotional instincts. The nimble company used the Prohibition period in America as a steppingstone to unimagined success. By the 1960s, however, diverging interests and various frictional relationships within the family and extended family began to wear on everyone. Greyton, who never wanted to be in the business in the first place but who had nevertheless come to lead it, wasn’t averse to cashing out, yet he had plans to stay involved an