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Evert Crosby was a writer by profession. He spent 12 years in New York City heading up the English section of the Voice of America during World War II and later writing scripts for commercial radio. In 1949 he started the High Tor winery on the beautiful High Tor Mountain site
overlooking Haverstraw Bay. Crosby, unlike many of his contemporaries and neighbors, was dedicated to producing a higher quality product in the region. His dream was to produce good wines and grapes on a small estate only twenty miles from New York City. The winery was considered the most famous small winegrowing estate in the east for many years. Crosby owned and operated the winery until 1970 when he sold it to local businessman, Richard Voigt. Voigt continued to make wines for the next six years until 1976 when he converted to crops other than grapes. Voigt later donated the land it to the state. It is now the High Tor State Park.
Crosby is important for defining the model that the Hudson River Valley is now beginning to follow, that is small family winery aspiring to produce quality table wine products. He proved that good table wines could be grown on the doorstep of the then largest city in the world. Crosby was one of the early proponents of changing the state's laws related to farm wineries. He was a mentor to the later New York farm winery champion, Mark Miller. He provided an impetus to the movement to treat wine as an agricultural rather than industrial product; an attitude which was partly realized in the 1976 Farm Winery Act. He lauded the lifestyle of the gentleman winemaker which continues to drive new advances in wine culture particularly in Long Island but increasingly in the Hudson River Valley as well.
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