"On October 12, 2005, a massive fire broke out in the Wines Central warehouse in Vallejo, California. Within hours, the flames had destroyed 4.5 million bottles of California's finest wine, worth more than $250 million, making it the largest destruction of wine in history. The fire had been deliberately set by a passionate oenophile named Mark Anderson, a skilled con man and thief with storage space at the warehouse who needed to cover his tracks. With a propane torch and a bucket of gasoline-soaked rags, Anderson ...
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"On October 12, 2005, a massive fire broke out in the Wines Central warehouse in Vallejo, California. Within hours, the flames had destroyed 4.5 million bottles of California's finest wine, worth more than $250 million, making it the largest destruction of wine in history. The fire had been deliberately set by a passionate oenophile named Mark Anderson, a skilled con man and thief with storage space at the warehouse who needed to cover his tracks. With a propane torch and a bucket of gasoline-soaked rags, Anderson annihilated entire California vineyard libraries as well as bottles of some of the most sought-after wines in the world. Among the priceless bottles destroyed were 175 bottles of Port and Angelica from one of the oldest vineyards in California made in 1875 by Frances Dinkelspiel's great-great grandfather Isaias Hellman. Sadly, Mark Anderson was not the first to harm the industry. The history of the California wine trade, dating back to the nineteenth century, is a tale of vineyards with dark and bloody pasts, rich men, strangling monopolies, the brutal enslavement of vineyard workers--and murder. Five of the wine trade murders were associated with Isaias Hellman's vineyard in Rancho Cucamonga, beginning with the killing of John Rains, who owned the land at the time. He was shot several times, dragged from a wagon, and left off the main road for the coyotes to feed on. In her new book, Frances Dinkelspiel looks beneath the casually elegant veneer of California's wine regions to find the obsession, greed, and violence lying in wait. Few people sipping a fine California Cabernet can even guess at the Tangled Vines where its life began"--
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Add this copy of Tangled Vines: Greed, Murder, Obsession and an Arsonist to cart. $33.83, good condition, Sold by Bonita rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Hialeah, FL, UNITED STATES, published 2016 by Thorndike Press Large Print.
This book is a great history of the wine industry. It is also a true story of a fire on Mare Island of a Wine Storage facility in 2005 and the arson investigation. It was fun to read about familiar restaurants and well known Bay Area residents. I have recommended it to numerous friends who also enjoyed it.
