The Taylor Wine Company helped fund the Curtiss Aircraft Museum in Hammondsport, and Walter foraged many of the aircraft memorabilia featured in the museum. He was proud of the community’s most famed citizen, aircraft pioneer Glenn Curtis, who built the nation’s first flying boat. Walter had several passions: the wine industry, art, and aviation. He once observed: “I have been thrown out of the New York State wine industry, out of my local club, even the Hammondsport Episcopal Church, rejected because I wanted honesty and integrity in the wine business.” “We brought it down to Coke in a manure spreader,” he told the press. His attacks earned him a citation for contempt and he was ordered to turn over to the Taylor Wine Company the offensive material he had put together. He created a label featuring a goat and the slogan, “They have my name and my heritage, but they didn’t get my goat.” On other labels, he pictured himself as the Lone Ranger with the caption: “Who was that masked man?” He issued bumper stickers which declared, “Enjoy Bully Hill, the un-Taylor.” Another label featured an owl, inscribed “Walter S. At one point, he gathered 200 supporters for a well-publicized rally where they joined him in inking his name off hundreds of bottles of Bully Hill Wine. A master of media manipulation, he counter attacked. Walter was a dynamic showman and that was all he needed to take advantage of a giant publicity opportunity. Coke won a court order barring him from promoting any link to Taylor wine, forbidding the use of the Taylor name in any form. A flamboyant promoter, he made Bully Hill the best-known winery in New York State.Ĭoca-Cola purchased The Taylor Wine Company in 1977 and immediately went after Walter Taylor. Some were hybrids, some were the best of the indigenous varietals. Walter released a batch of wines with names like Old Trawler White, Meat Market Red and Le Grande Blush. Using secondhand equipment and tanks salvaged from other firms, he crusaded for the hybrids designed to withstand the cruel winters of the region.
Greyton Taylor, his father, and chief winemaker Dick Vine had transformed the site in 1968 to test small batches of grapes.īefore his year in exile ended, Walter had taken over the research winery and converted it into Bully Hill Vineyards and focused on hybrids. Walter, always dramatic, chose to be fired, and moved on to Bully Hill, the original home of Taylor Wine, later a barrel-making plant. Outraged, the board of directors at Taylor Wine, many of them close relatives, told him he could resign or be fired. In 1970, he told an audience of wine executives in San Francisco that the water level at Keuka Lake dropped several inches during bottling season. Walter spoke out loudly and openly against local winemaking practices, particularly attacking the use of California grapes in New York wines. He was David versus Goliath, a small winemaker battling giant Coca Cola, which had barred him from using his family name after it purchased the Taylor Wine Company, the business his ancestors had founded in 1880 in Hammondsport. He was inescapable in print, on news programs and television talk shows in farmer overalls and cowboy hats. How quickly we forget our heroes.įrom the late ’70s and throughout the ’80s, Walter Taylor was a latter-day Johnny Appleseed, appearing nationwide. I was surprised when no one at my table knew the story behind that name. To date, 11 wineries grace the Keuka Lake region.One day recently, I served a bottle of Sweet Walter white wine to guests. Ever since, Bully Hill has been known as the home of innovation.īully Hill Vineyards was the first small estate winery in the Keuka Lake area since Prohibition, and became the cornerstone for the growth of many wineries.
Slowly they rebuilt a winery, and in 1970 Bully Hill Vineyards, Inc. Greyton and Walter began to convert the vineyards from Native American grapes to French American hybrids, pioneering these varieties in New York State. Taylor purchased the vineyards back from Lloyd Sprague. The original winery site atop Bully Hill was sold to Lloyd Sprague. In 1929, the Taylor family moved the winery to a new site, two miles outside the Village of Hammondsport. The successful winery needed a consistent water and electrical power supply, which it could not get at its original site.
In 1920, as the Taylor Wine Company rapidly expanded, the Taylor family bought grapes from numerous local vineyardists. The family has been either growing grapes or producing wine since 1878. Taylor represents the fourth generation of his family to be involved in grape growing and winemaking. Bully Hill Farms was started by Greyton H.