In October 2005, the largest wine arson in the world occurred: at least 4.5 million bottles of wine worth more than $250 million dollars went up in flames in a Navy bunker turned wine cellar outside of San Francisco. Among the bottles lost was some of Napa Valley’s best, as well as some of California’s rarest and oldest wine.
Mark Anderson, a wine connoisseur, collector and seller, was convicted of the crime, caught after years of defrauding the wine collectors with whom he had cultivated deep relationships. He stole and sold their wine from the cellar he was charged with looking after, and to cover his tracks and destroy evidence, set the bunker ablaze.
But Anderson was not the first to try to destroy the California wine industry through greed and manipulation. In TANGLED VINES: Greed, Murder, Obsession, and an Arsonist in the Vineyards of California (St. Martin’s Press, October 6, 2015, Hardcover, eBook), Frances Dinkelspiel goes back in time to uncover the California wine industry’s dark and bloody past. From murder to enslavement to controlling monopolies, California’s “elixir of the gods” has had many unsavory moments in its history. Dinkelspiel also tracks the growing trend of wine crime and wine fraud.
Throughout TANGLED VINES, Dinkelspiel reports on her own family’s wine history as well: researching a bottle of Port made by her great-great grandfather in 1875 from one of the state’s oldest vineyards at a time when Southern California dominated the wine making business (many of those bottles were lost in the arson; she had one bottle in her home cellar).
TANGLED VINES is a thrilling, sometimes unbelievable (but completely true), tale of a man obsessed with wine, the lengths he goes to destroy it when he is denied entrée to its rarified world, and the economic and personal havoc his crime creates. The ripple effect of this arson, ten years ago this October, can still be felt in the California wine industry, and with winemakers worldwide.
TANGLED VINES
Greed, Murder, Obsession, and an Arsonist in the Vineyards of California
By Frances Dinkelspiel
St. Martins Press
October 6, 2015, Hardcover, eBook
