Chapter 10 - the winery was not her personal kingdom
One of the most useful things Andrew Sloan did was strip the conflict of melodrama.
Eleanor did not personally own everything.
The winery operated through Hayes Family Vineyards, a privately held company with a board, operating bylaws, and several voting shareholders. Matthew controlled a significant portion of those shares after his father’s death, but not because Eleanor waved a hand and made him king. There were structures. Governance. Professional managers. Auditors. Lenders.
That mattered because for years Eleanor had blurred the line between social authority and legal authority. If she wanted someone excluded from a table, a guest list, or a guest cottage, it felt to everyone around her as if she had exercised actual power. Often she had. But not always the kind she imagined.
Once Matthew told the company’s counsel about the historical misuse of staff and certain business channels in the handling of my mother’s situation, they opened a limited internal review. Not because anyone believed the company could somehow litigate a decades-old love affair. But because Eleanor appeared to have used corporate infrastructure—assistants, office equipment, internal mail, and a house account—to further a private scheme with legal and reputational implications.
The findings were careful and boring in the best way.
Yes, company resources had been used in ways that violated policy as we understand it now.
Yes, certain archival records were improperly retained or misfiled.
No, this did not mean the winery suddenly belonged to me.
No, it did not mean Eleanor could be stripped overnight of every economic interest she lawfully held.
That kind of fantasy was exactly what I wanted to avoid.
What the review did lead to was more realistic. Eleanor was removed from any informal role in staffing or event oversight. Private family instructions could no longer be relayed to company personnel without documentation. The board insisted that future personal expenditures and company expenditures remain rigorously separated. And Matthew, for the first time in his adult life, stopped treating his mother’s preferences as a form of executive guidance.
That last change hit her hardest.
Not because of the money.
Because she was used to turning family atmosphere into business fact.
I watched that shift in real time during a later reception where I was not present as staff, not present as family, but not entirely absent from the Hayes orbit either. Eleanor wanted a guest uninvited over “optics.” Matthew said no. The event proceeded. The world did not end.
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Power often begins to look smaller the first time someone simply declines to obey it.
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