much-parodied outtake for one commercial from the campaign features Welles attempting to deliver his lines while severely inebriated. Welles was eventually fired as a spokesman for the brand in 1981, after answering a question about Paul Masson on a TV chat show, saying that he was now on a diet and so no longer drank wine; he was (briefly) replaced as spokesman by John Gielgud. Despite the ads' success at the time, the Paul Masson brand has suffered from a long-term image problem, particularly since its founder's death in 1940, in being synonymous with low-end wines. As The New York Times observed in 1990: "While many consumers know them - who can forget Orson Welles's breathy incantation of 'We will sell no wine before its time' for Masson - they lack cachet." Paul Masson and NASA In the 1970s, NASA bought Masson Rare Cream Sherry for a Skylab mission and packaged some for testing on a "zero-G" aircraft. Unfortunately, the smell quickly permeated the cabin making astronauts physically sick, and public pressure over taking alcohol into space led NASA to abandon their plans. Ownership of Paul Masson wines Martin Ray (1936–42) After the death of his wife, Louise Lefranc, in 1936, Masson placed the winery on the market. Mentored by Paul Masson, California wine pioneer Martin Ray purchased the winery and vineyards. However, two years after Masson's own death in 1940, Ray sold the winery, using the proceeds to buy land on the hilltop across from the old Paul Masson vineyards in Saratoga, where he used Burgundian cuttings of Pinot noir and Chardonnay from the Masson estate to craft a single varietal, region-specific wine from 1943 through 1972, in what is now known as Mount Eden Vineyards. Seagram Company (1942–87) Six years after buying the Paul Masson winery and brand, Martin Ray sold them to the Canadian-based Seagram Company, Ltd, the global wine and spirits conglomerate, which (along with minority share owners) owned the brand for the next 45 years, although as early as 1952 they closed Masson's Saratoga winery as a working wine estate. It was Seagram who, worried by the brand's sagging sales in the 1970s, brought in first Orson Welles (1978–81) and then John Gielgud (1982–85) as advertising spokespersons for the wines. In the 1980s, Seagram also acquired the Taylor California Cellars brand (and production facilities) from Coca-Cola, based on the premise promoted by Seagram's strategic planning