Every since I wrote Tangled Vines, I have become somewhat of a specialist on wine fraud. It’s not that hard to do given that wine crime is a growing industry. Every week, it seems, some merchant or wine maker or thief tries a new way to steal wine and sell it on the black or gray market.

In 2015 and 2016, I wrote many stories for Berkeleyside, the website I co-founded, on John Fox, who ran one of the world’s largest wine Ponzi schemes. He ran a fine wine store in Berkeley named Premier Cru and did a brisk business selling wine futures: i.e. wines still aging in barrels.