Frances Dinkelspiel, Author at Frances Dinkelspiel

Tangled Vines is a New York Times bestseller!

November 20, 2015 by Frances Dinkelspiel 1 Comment

I got the call all author’s dream about.

In my case, it was an email. On Monday, Nov. 16, my editor at St. Martins Press, Michael Flamini, sent me a message.

“Tangled Vines” is #10 on the NYT monthly crime bestsellers list!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Yahoo! We can now say, on any reprint and the paperback, “New York Times Bestseller”!!!!!

He then sent me the link.

I was flabbergasted. I knew Tangled Vines had been selling briskly in the Bay Area. (It made the San Francisco Chronicle/NCIBA bestseller list for the week ending Oct. 25, 2015. But to get on the NYT list, a book has to sell well throughout the United States. (I think. The methodology is a tightly guarded secret). I had no idea my book was selling elsewhere.

Tripping through southern California’s 19th century wine past

November 4, 2015 by Frances Dinkelspiel Leave a Comment

I am standing at Vineyard Plaza in Rancho Cucamonga, the site of the winery that served Cucamonga Winery for more than 100 years.

I have been having a great time touring around talking about Tangled Vines: Greed, Murder, Obsession and an Arsonist on the Vineyards of California. I am in Los Angeles as I write this, taking a breather after talking at The Homestead Museum in the City of Industry, the Galleano Winery in Mira Loma in Riverside County, the Huntington Library in San Marino, and the Hillcrest Country Club in Los Angeles. In between I had a newspaper and radio interview! I am not complaining – far from it – but tired since all those events were crammed into three days.

On the road with my book, Tangled Vines

October 8, 2015 by Frances Dinkelspiel 3 Comments

Angie Coiro is getting ready to interview me on Oct. 7 for her radio show, In Deep. She tapes it live each week at Keplers’ Books in San Mateo.

Tangled Vines was officially published on Tuesday Oct. 6. On Wednesday, I did my first outreach for the book. I went to Kepler’s Books in Menlo Park to appear on In Deep, a radio show hosted by Angie Coiro. Many Bay Area residents will remember Angie from her days as a traffic announcer. Then she was on KQED. Now she has an independent radio show that is broadcast on WPWC in Washington D.C. as well as on the web. Angie asked some great questions about the book, the crime, and the history of wine. It was clear she had read the book (not a given in an interview) and knew its main points.

Violence in the Vineyards

September 25, 2015 by Frances Dinkelspiel Leave a Comment

St. Junipero Serra

On Wednesday, Sept. 23, much of the Catholic world was focused on the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington D.C. Pope Francis, a pope who has come to symbolize the rights of the poor and downtrodden, anointed Junipero Serra a saint. In doing so, the Pope cast light on the brutal history and treatment of Native Americans during the Mission period.

But Californians shouldn’t sit back smugly and think that violence against Indians was just a problem of the Franciscans. Serra, a citizen of Spain, may have started the trend of forcing Indians to work against their will, but the Mexicans and Americans who assumed control over California at different points in the 19^th Century were worse in many ways.

In working on Tangled Vines, the most disturbing part of my research has been the realization that Native Americans paid the highest personal price for the development of the wine business. California wine may now earn international accolades and generate $24.6 billion a year, but the industry was founded on a philosophy of greed and violence.

5 little-known facts about the history of California wine

September 11, 2015 by Frances Dinkelspiel 7 Comments

My forthcoming book, Tangled Vines, focuses on the largest crime involving wine in history: an arson fire that destroyed 4.5 million bottles of wine worth $250 million.

The book also traces the life one of the bottles lost in the fire. It was made in 1875 in a vineyard in Rancho Cucamonga in southern California by my great-great grandfather, Isaias Hellman.

I did a lot of research on the history of California wine for my book and found some fun things.

Here are five little-known facts about California wine:

1) The Franciscan fathers were the first to plant grapes in California. Father Junipero Serra wrote to his bosses in Baja California in the late 18th century and asked that they ship grapevines north. The grapes were planted at Mission San Juan Capistrano near Los Angeles. They were named Mission grapes and became the primary grape used for making wine throughout the 1880s, even though the wine they produced was flat and bland. Historians think the first harvest in California was in 1782.

My new book, Tangled Vines, will be published in October

September 6, 2015 by Frances Dinkelspiel Leave a Comment

I am very excited to announce that my new book, Tangled Vines: Greed, Murder, Obsession and an Arsonist in the Vineyards of California will be published on Oct. 6, 2015 by St. Martin’s Press.

I have been working on this book since late 2009, ever since I wrote a story for the New York Times about an arsonist who destroyed 4.5 million bottles of fine California wine worth more than $250 million. The culprit set fire to a wine warehouse in Vallejo in October 2005. Four years later, he was about to go to trial for the crime.

It was only later that I realized that 175 bottles of wine made by my great great grandfather Isaias Hellman in 1875 in Rancho Cucamonga were burned up in that fire. I had long wanted to write about Hellman’s involvement in wine. For my first book, Towers of Gold, I had examined Hellman’s role in the banking industry, as well as other endeavors, but I had glossed over his role as a wine maker and businessman. I realized in 2010 that I might have my next book topic – an examination of the arson, the largest involving wine in history, with a special focus on that 130-year old bottle and how it came to be.

Resurrecting the dead: the ghosts of past Jewish San Franciscans

November 4, 2014 by Frances Dinkelspiel 3 Comments

An actor dressed as Adolph Sutro, a former mayor of San Francisco

Adolph Sutro, the former mayor of San Francisco, stood by his wife’s grave, a long slab of granite nestled on a slight incline near the top of the Home of Peace cemetery in Colma.

Sutro then pointed to his name, chiseled on a step near his wife’s tomb, and explained that he really wasn’t buried there. He had been disinterred and buried in three different spots. His remains had been moved so many time no one knew were they rested.

Interviewing famous people for Uncharted: The Berkeley Festival of Ideas

October 30, 2014 by Frances Dinkelspiel Leave a Comment

I am interviewing Saru Jayarama here at Uncharted: The Berkeley Festival of Ideas. Photo: Pete Rosos

Two years ago, Berkeleyside, the news site I co-founded and write for, launched Uncharted: The Berkeley Festival of Ideas. The idea was to use the ideas that form Berkeley – notions of social justice, world-class science, food, etc, – as a basis to hold a gathering that would explore them in depth. The second Uncharted happened last weekend, Oct. 24-25, in downtown Berkeley.

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