The Passing of a York County Pioneer

My first memory of Dick Naylor was in 1999 when I came back from Wineries Unlimited in Lancaster on my way back to State College.  I had just picked up a 1000L variable capacity tank in the back of my Toyota truck and I had heard that Naylor Wine Cellars had a label printer that I was interested in seeing.

Dick passed away last week, and this past Monday I attended the funeral service to commemorate his life.

When I stepped in to Naylor Wine Cellars in Stewartstown that day, I was struggling to find my feet in this new industry I had entered.  I was greeted warmly by Dick and spent some time with his son-in-law winemaker Ted Potter talking about custom label printers.  It was an innocuous meeting, but spoke volumes about the new industry and life I found myself in.  To treat "competitors" like colleagues was a new experience to me.

Fast-forward a couple years, and my wife Kris and I are the new owners at Allegro Vineyards in Brogue, working hard to get on our feet and find out way in the wine world.  Naylor was always the bigger winery in the area, and Dick was a figure who loomed larger than life to us at the time.

I spent the first year and a half at Allegro every day with John Crouch (my mentor and first owner and winemaker of Allegro) listening to the stories of the history of the area and Allegro and PA wine in general.  John and Mike Fiore and Dick were an amazing trio for this area.  Dick's ability to befriend everyone, Mike's memory for stories, and John's quiet contemplation made these three something in the vein of the three Musketeers for this part of the world.

I'm sure there were gallons of wine shared between them, and the visions they must have spoken about might actually have come to fruition as I look out upon our industry's landscape today.

I've always lived by the idea that if we don't know our history, we're doomed to repeat it.  I've seen it become painfully obvious to me.  I've always enjoyed listening to folks much older than me tell me about what's come before.  It's like fitting pieces of a puzzle into its final shape.  Without all the pieces, you only see part of the image.

I can only imagine what this place--York county wine, PA wine, East coast wine--would be like without someone like Dick Naylor.  He and I didn't always see eye-to-eye on everything.  But I always respected him as my elder, and I'd like to think that he eventually didn't view me as the young, ignorant guy asking questions about labelers.

But what I'll always remember is that one time, back in 2005, I had the fortune to taste a wine he had made over twenty years earlier.  One of our customers was moving from the area and didn't want to move all the bottles from his wine collection.  When I went to pick up the old Allegro bottles he wanted to give back to us, he had a bottle of 1984 Naylor Cabernet Sauvignon.  I told him I'd happily take our bottles back (that John had made) but that the Naylor wine wasn't really mine to accept.  He told me, in no uncertain terms, that I had to take the bottle along if I wanted the Allegro ones.

For some background, I'll say that 1984 was the first year that John and Tim made a Cadenza.  It was 2/3 Cabernet Franc and 1/3 Merlot blend.  In the future, the wine would be predominantly Cabernet Sauvignon, and I had always wondered why this grape was missing from the first Cadenza.  Turns out, in all of the returns of old Allegro wine that day, there was a 1984 Allegro Cabernet Sauvignon.

It was awful.  Horrendous.  The winemaking was OK.  But obviously the wine suffered from a lack of ripeness that tasted like the vines had succumbed to a downy mildew infection sometime during the season.  It was undrinkable.

The Naylor wine from 1984, on the other hand, was impeccable.  I was stunned, and from that moment on I had a different mindset as to what these men were doing back in the 1980s, pioneering in this part of the wine world.  They were making history.

As I think back on all of this after Dick's passing, all I can think of is how far we have come.  And how much we all are standing on the shoulders of giants.

Not 100% sure about this: (from the early 1980s, left to right) Fernando Franco, vineyard manager at Barboursville in VA, Alan Kinne winemaker from Virginia, Bob Lyons from Byrd Winery in MD (?), Dr. Carl Haeseler from Penn State, John Crouch from Allegro Vineyards, and Dick Naylor from Naylor Wine Cellars