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Vineyard Brands Inc., which spent its first two decades headquartered in a rustic, renovated Vermont barn facing an unpaved country road, left its home in Chester in May of 1997 and moved south to Birmingham.
President and CEO Jerry Neff recalls the task he had in assuring his colleagues he hadn't lost his mind.
"It's kind of funny in retrospect," he says. "We brought the employees down to Birmingham several times on our dime. I think they expected big steel mills, blowing black smoke over the horizon. What they found was so diametrically opposite of what they had thought."
Neff, who took over the business from founder Robert Haas in 1990, had lived in Atlanta for about 20 years.
"After I met my wife-to-be in Birmingham, I moved here for a couple of years. My friends in Atlanta couldn't understand it. They all sort of looked down their noses at Birmingham, thought of it as a one-horse town,"...