"they Took My Name But They Didn't Get My Goat"

Taylor Wine Company prevented Walter S. Taylor from using his name on his own wines. Says Walter

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On April 4, 1970 when Walter S. Taylor got up to address members of the Wine, Spirits, and Whiskey Wholesalers of America at a luncheon reception in the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco, he was near the summit of his profession. He was the grandson of Walter Taylor, who had founded the well-known Taylor Wine Co. of Hammondsport, N.Y. He was an executive vice-president of the company's Great Western Division. He had just returned from a three-month fact-finding tour of some of the finest wineries and vineyards in the world. The San Francisco Examiner called him "one of the nation's more important executive champagne producers."

A month later, the Taylor Wine Co. fired him. His wife left him. "I didn't even have a car," he says. "It was a tough time."

Seven years later, in July of 1977, shortly after it had merged with Coca-Cola Co., the Taylor Wine Co. sued Walter Taylor to stop him from using his last name. U.S. District Court Judge Harold P. Burke agreed with the complaint. Suddenly Walter had lost even his name.

His firing and the later two-year legal battle changed Walter. When he had spoken at the wholesalers reception in 1970, he looked like a solid, duty-bound company man in his charcoal-gray slacks, salt-and-pepper tweed sports coat, white shirt, and narrow, dark tie. His blond hair was cut short and smoothed down with pomade. His light-blue eyes sparkled as he watched the crowd slurp samples of his company's champagne.

Years later, Walter had taken to calling himself "a prisoner of the court... born into crime." As part of his company's promotional literature, he included a self-portrait. The man in this picture wore a rumpled felt hat. He had a wide mustache and his eyes seemed slightly sinister. The background was aggressively black. Anywhere his name appeared, the last name had been inked out in felt-tip marker.

What had Walter done?

At the reception in San Francisco in 1970, Walter blasted the wine industry for being dishonest with the consuming public because chemicals and other ingredients were being added to the wines and the public wasn't being told. "If we don't start being absolutely honest with the public about what is in the bottle, we will be in a Ralph Nader situation," he told the crowd.

Although he didn't name names, Walter said he knew that some wineries in New York State were misleading the public by using the smallest amount of wine distilled from native grapes allowed by federal law and making up the difference with so-called tank-car wines, that is, out-of-state or foreign wines, and then calling the end product a "New York State wine." "I was telling the whole industry," Walter says, "to cleanse itself before somebody else did."

A month later, Walter says, the board of directors of the Taylor Wine Co. decided at a "secret meeting" to fire him while his father, Greyton H. Taylor, then president of the company, was out of town. Even today, the incident is lost in a murky backwash of remors and recriminations. "Oh, I know," Walter says, "people say I was flying in prostitutes from Paris at company expense." It would be fair to say, however, that Walter's performance in San Francisco offended Taylor officials.

Walter was determined to carry on the Taylor family's winemaking tradition. Even though he had been cast out by the very company his grandfather founded, there were other ways to keep the tradition alive. In 1958, when he was 27, Walter bought 70 acres of land on Bully Hill on the outskirts of Hammondsport, N.Y. This land meant a lot to Walter. It was hallowed ground. His grandfather had first owned it in 1886 and worked it for 31 years until the property changed hands. Walter claims this fertile acreage as the site of the original Taylor family winery. Throughout the 1960s, Walter had used his spare time to experiment with French-American grape varieties on Bully Hill and gradually develop a small winery owned jointly by him and his father. By 1967, Walter's experiments had begun to pay off and the winery bottled its first vintage in very limited quantities. In January 1970, Walter and his father decided to incorporate their hobby vineyard as Bully Hill Vineyards Inc. After he was fired, the fledgling winery, once Walter's part-time pleasure, became his consuming passion.

Walter fashioned tiny Bully Hill Vineyards Inc. to conform with his outlook on life. It would be the antithesis of the corporate world he had just left. In that world, as Walter saw it, decisions and actions were based on greed for profits, but in Walter's world greed would be replaced by honesty in winemaking.

In a world grown increasingly anonymous, Walter would keep things very personal. He put his suits and ties in mothballs and took to wearing denim, bib-overalls, down vests, and floppy hats. His winery became a protected enclave where Walter could feel himself grow.

To commemorate the birth of Bully Hill, he captured his thoughts and emotions in a four-foot by four-foot redwood woodcut that became the symbol of his vineyard.It shows an open human palm with fingers extended, and grapes and grapevines growing out of the fingertips. Underneath the woodcarving, Walter wrote: "A product is an extension of a person's soul."

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