NEW SCOTLAND — Picard’s Grove, once a community gathering place for generations and more recently the subject of a legal battle over its future use, is now being proposed as the new home of an award-winning local winery. 

Meadowdale Winery has filed for a special-use permit from the town of New Scotland to allow for a winery and tasting room at 111 Picard Road, at the site of the former Picard’s Grove.

The winery is currently located at 32 Fryer Lane in the town of Guilderland.

After months of legal wrangling, the 87-acre Picard property was purchased by neighbors Valerie and Richard Glover in October 2020, working with the Mohawk Hudson Land Conservancy to insure an easement, protecting the land from development. The acreage is part of a protected corridor along the Helderberg escarpment.

If it were to move into Picard’s saloon building, that would allow the winery to consolidate its entire operation under one roof, Meadowdale’s John Sheehan told the planning board at its April 4 meeting. “This would be a larger, easier-to-access space for us to handle our production,” Sheehan said.

There’s no kitchen and no plans to prepare food on-site other than what’s already authorized for farm-wineries, Sheehan told the board: pre-packaged hard cheeses and summer sausage. The winery would need a kitchen license to serve anything else, he said, which it has no intention of doing. 

Sheehan said he wants to expand the days the tasting room is open to the public from Saturday and Sunday to include Friday, and move from six months to a year-round operation. 

A public hearing on the proposal was set for the board’s next meeting, on May 2.

Stonewell liquor store

The planning board on April 4 gave conditional site approval to a proposed liquor store in Stonewell Plaza. 

The application was submitted by Amin Ashish Maheshku.

A liquor store was previously approved for Stonewell Plaza, Chairman Jeffrey Baker said during the meeting, but it never opened. 

One of the “questions we had was traffic-parking capacity,” Baker said; there was an offer from the previous applicants not to have morning hours so there was no conflict with other tenants, which Maheshku agreed to. 

There’s also an ongoing septic problem at Stonewell, Baker said.

He said the septic system — which has been breaching and leaking onto adjoining properties — is not up to code and Stonewell is under a consent order from the town to overhaul the system. 

Stonewell has been trying for some time to tie-in into the new sewer line running along Route 85 to the new Grove at Maple Point, but has yet to finalize the deal. 

“Frankly, this situation has been allowed to go on for too long,” Baker said, but he didn’t want to punish the applicant although he was concerned about approving the liquor store without a hard deadline on the sewer.

Baker said it wasn’t his intention “to facilitate more tenants in that space when the landlord’s not making investments for upgrading the property.”

Stonewell’s septic problems also offer a new perspective on tenant accusations that the Grove at Maple Point flooded its store in November 2021. 

The liquor store was given conditional site-plan approval so Maheshku could move forward with the licensing process of the State Liquor Authority, and the store can open but it won’t be allowed to remain open unless Stonewell ties into the new sewer line, and the landlord, Zoe Anderson, agrees to have the sewer infrastructure in place within 30 days of the line being dedicated to the town.

129 School Road

Frank Crisafulli on April 4 was looking for site-plan approval to allow for a beverage distribution center at 129 School Road, which sits in New Scotland’s industrial district on the Guilderland town line. 

Crisafulli has a brewery license, which allows the holder to wholesale beer, but said he won’t be running a brewery out of School Road. He said his Westmere Beverage location has a brewery license that will be transferred to School Road. 

The board approved the site plan for the proposal.