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Frances Dinkelspiel

Author | Journalist | Speaker

St. Martin's Press

(October 6, 2015)

320 pages

ISBN: 978-1250033222

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Tangled Vines

Greed, Murder, Obsession and an Arsonist in the Vineyards of California

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The arson fire that ripped through the Wines Central warehouse in Vallejo on Oct. 12, 2005 destroyed around 4.5 million bottles of wine worth at least $250 million, making it the largest crime involving wine in history. Photo courtesy of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives.

Before he set fire to the wine warehouse, Mark C. Anderson faced charges that he embezzled 8,000 bottles of wine worth more than $1.1 million from his clients at Sausalito Cellars, his wine storage company. In this 2006 photo, Anderson is at the Marin County courthouse for an embezzlement hearing. Photo courtesy of Jeff Vendsel/ Marin Independent Journal.

ATF investigator Brian O. Parker spent ten years on the Anderson case, from the 2005 fire to Anderson’s 2007 arrest to his 2012 conviction and subsequent appeal. On the ground is the the propane torch that was used to start the Wines Central warehouse fire.

Delia Viader, who started Viader Vineyards on Howell Mountain in the late 1980s, lost her entire 2003 vintage, about 7,400 cases, in the warehouse fire. Her insurance company refused to pay her, forcing Viader to sell her beloved Italian vineyard.

Dick Ward, who co-founded Saintsbury in the Carneros region of the Napa Valley, stands by boxes of wine that were scorched, but not destroyed, in the warehouse fire. Ward has stacked the boxes in the back of his barrel room, a constant reminder of the fire that destroyed his winery’s library of wine on the eve of its 25th anniversary.

In 1858, John Rains, a former cattle driver and Confederate sympathizer, used funds from his wife, Maria Merced Williams de Rains, to purchase Rancho Cucamonga for $16,500. He expanded and improved the vineyard. Rains’s murder in 1862 sparked a series of killings that terrorized the Los Angeles region.

In 1870, Isaias W. Hellman, a 28-year-old German Jew who opened one of Los Angeles’ first banks and the author’s great-great grandfather, bought Rancho Cucamonga at a sheriff’s sale for $49,200. He made the 1875 wine that was destroyed in the 2005 wine warehouse fire.

The 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire destroyed ten million gallons of wine and many of the buildings owned by the California Wine Association, the monopoly that eventually controlled 80% of the California wine industry, including its headquarters, show here. Photo courtesy of the California Historical Society.

In 1906, after the earthquake, the California Wine Association consolidated is operations at Winehaven, a massive winery near the city of Richmond on the eastern shore of San Francisco Bay. It was the largest winemaking facility in the world until Prohibition. Many of the original buildings, included a crenellated brick building that resembles a medieval castle, are still standing, although they are disintegrating.

Copyright © 2020 Frances Dinkelspiel