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

by Frances Dinkelspiel

On October 12, 2005, a massive fire broke out in the Wines Central wine 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 by Frances Dinkelspiel's great-great grandfather, Isaias Hellman, in 1875. Sadly, Mark Anderson was not the first to harm the industry. The history of the California wine trade, dating back to the 19th Century, is a story of vineyards with dark and bloody pasts, tales of 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.

Genres: Nonfiction, Wine, History, True Crime, Book Club, Crime, Food

487 pages, Hardcover

First published July 7, 2015

About the author

Frances Dinkelspiel is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, People Magazine and elsewhere. She is the co-founder of Berkeleyside, an award-winning news site. Her newest book is Tangled Vines: Greed, Murder, Obsession, and an Arsonist in the Vineyards of California. Her first book was the bestselling, award-winning Towers of Gold: How One Jewish Immigrant Named Isaias Hellman Created California.

Reviews

[Steve Alcorn · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a wine enthusiast and collector I found this very interesting, but also a bit odd. It's really three different books shuffled together. The part I was most interested in was the story of the arson fire that destroyed many of California's winery's libraries and in some cases whole vintages. It was told in narrative non-fiction form, and was very gripping.

The book also contains a couple of chapters on other wine frauds, and these chapters were also interesting, since I've been on the losing side of a couple of fake bottles.

But about a third of the book is about the author's ancestors' wine operation in Rancho Cucamonga in the late 1800s. This material was the result of research for an earlier book, and I found it completely irrelevant to the other information. The fact that 175 of those bottles were destroyed in the fire seemed with a footnote at most. I ended up skipping most of this information.

Nevertheless, if you are interested in wines and wine collecting I recommend this book for its gripping portrayal of several memorable frauds.

[Miranda · Rating 5 out of 5]

My cousin wrote this book and I'm mentioned a few times in it! Very interesting weaving of CA wine history and the arson story.

[Susan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This will be my go to book for gifts for my wine loving friends.....and will also bring the book along with a bottle of wine as a gift, when I am invited for dinner engagements.

Wine, history, intrigue and fine writing...the perfect combo...for the chillier Fall nights. The fact that the author made a personal connection with the arsonist and has a family connection with the vintner makes the book even more appealing to curl up with.

Our book group is already excitably planning on a wine tasting night for when we discuss Tangled Vines.

[Eden Prosper · Rating 4 out of 5]

Having developed a real appreciation for wine over the last few years, this was an instant yes for me. Wine and true crime? Say no more.

However, upon cracking open Tangled Vines, my cognitive faculties were thoroughly obliterated by the sheer, unbridled scale of upper-bourgeois absurdity. I always assumed wine was reserved for people who own velvet smoking jackets and refer to summer as a verb, but these folks have completely detached from the mortal realm. I understand having a hobby, but I physically cannot comprehend the mind of a man who willingly engages in a blood-gladiator duel over a dusty bottle of fermented grape juice squeezed during a specific lunar cycle in 1842.

Meanwhile, there’s me: a broke, gravel-eating metalhead skulking in the sticky, fluorescent-lit abyss of the Party Liquor bargain aisle, scavenging through dusty crates with the three crumpled five-dollar bills my corporate overlords graciously tossed into my slop trough this week. To me, finding a 2020 estate-bottled French Bordeaux on sale for $9.99 feels like I just cracked open an ancient Egyptian tomb and stole the Pharaoh's gold. I half-expect angelic choruses to erupt from the ceiling speakers right next to the neon Coors Light sign.

This modest triumph, however, is promptly annihilated upon turning the page to learn of a venture capitalist who casually remitted $800k at a clandestine high-stakes auction, merely to evaluate the cork’s aroma and discharge a single sip into an artisanal crystal spittoon. Eight. Hundred. Thousand US DOLLARS! That's accidentally-leave-your-yacht-in-Monaco-and-just-buy-a-new-one-because-flying-back-is-too-much-hassle kinda money. Reading about this golden-throne illuminati wine club made me feel like if I so much as glanced at a glass of Cabernet without a trust fund, a sniper laser from the High Society Patrol was going to immediately dot my forehead.

But anyway! I digress.

In Tangled Vines, Dinkelspiel pulls back the velvet curtain on California’s celebrated viticultural empire, exposing a murky underbelly of historical greed, institutional violence, and relentless ambition. The narrative anchors itself in the catastrophic 2005 arson of a Vallejo wine warehouse, a desperate cover-up by fraudster Mark Anderson to incinerate the evidence of his extensive pilfering, before executing a sweeping historical audit back to the 19th century.

Channeling the atmospheric dread and narrative momentum of other great writers like Erik Larson and David Grann, Dinkelspiel orchestrates a dual-timeline structure that toggles fluidly between modern corporate arson and Victorian-era land grabs. This structural ping-pong kept me thoroughly hooked whilst it subtly contextualized why a warehouse full of dusty, fermented liquid was worth burning to the ground in the first place. Adding to the drama is Dinkelspiel’s own dog in the fight; her ancestral family lost their own historic vintage in the blaze, an intimate personal stake that provides an emotional gut-punch without derailing her rigorous, archival objectivity.

The overarching thesis is as stark as it is cynical; high-end wine (not unlike fine art, haute couture, or modern haute horlogerie) is an asset class fueled entirely by manufactured scarcity, prestige, and mythologized provenance. Consequently, beneath the idyllic facade of sun-drenched vineyards and romanticized craftsmanship lies a ruthless legacy of monopolies, blood feuds, and desperate swindles. The modern gilded oligarchy of the wine world, it turns out, is simply the sophisticated iteration of old-school frontier banditry; today’s economic disparities and unchecked corporate vanity are merely the polished descendants of 19th-century land barons.

When California became a state in 1850, it immediately legalized a practice of short-term indentured servitude for the Native Americans, a practice of which winemakers took advantage. One of the first acts passed by the California Legislator was a law nicknamed the Indian Indenture act. It stripped Native Americans of most of their rights, including the right to vote or testify against whites in court. The law also made it easy for vineyardists and farmers to use the pretext of vagrancy to obtain cheap Indian labor. Any Indian who appeared to be drunk or loitering, or was seen in a place where liquor was sold, could be arrested. Sometimes just the word of a white man could lead to an arrest. A justice of the peace could order that the Indian be hired out for up to four months to the highest bidder to pay off his fine. -page 88

For me, the real tragedy wasn’t the financial loss, but the irreplaceable history, the rare library vintages saved to watch their complexity evolve over time, and the bottles passed down through generations. Money can always be remade, but once a bottle like an 1875 vintage is gone, a piece of history is lost forever.

At the end of the day, Dinkelspiel’s story is a reminder that while our technology and aesthetic tastes may evolve, the darker mechanisms of human nature remain spectacularly unchanged. The stage props and price tags shift over time, but the core motivations of unhinged ambition, fear of irrelevance, toxic pride, and raw, unadulterated avarice continue to drive the human animal to absolute madness.

[Julia Siler · Rating 5 out of 5]

I gulped down this page-turning chronicle of big egos, bold Cabernets, and brazen wine wars. Frances Dinkelspiel vividly captures the wild early years of California's wine industry as well as the modern crime revealing the dark obsession some people have for wine. I'll never look at a bottle of Napa Valley Cabernet in quite the same way again.

[Joan Gelfand · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dinkelspiel is a researcher of high scruples, tireless investigation and a finder of fun facts and more. This book delivered SO much more than I expected. I thought I would learn about the fire - which fascinated me - and instead I learned the ENTIRE history of the California wine industry. Brilliant.

[Susan Liston · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 Combines a history of the wine industry in California interspersed with a contemporary wine crime story (who knew there was so much wine crime?) This was this month's selection for the Phineas Banning Literary Society, last time we read Frances Dinkelspiel's book "Towers of Gold" about her ancestor Isaias Hellman, a key figure in the development of Los Angeles, who figures in this book, so the historic aspect was our focus. But the crime stuff was interesting, also.

[Cheri · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book intertwines two stories, one the history of California winemaking and the other the crime in 2005 that destroyed more than $100 million worth of wine. The author, a journalist, became interested in the story through her family's historical connection to the industry. I had always imagined European winemakers planting their ancestral vines in the rolling hills of Napa, but learned that Los Angeles had been the original heart of the California wine industry, that Native Americans were forced into slave labor in the vineyards, and that Wild West gunfights are as much a part of the history of winemaking as of Tombstone Territory. Dinkelspiel does an especially good job presenting the tale of convicted arsonist Mark Anderson; she lets a portrait of a very disturbed man unfold over the course of the book. The book was carefully researched and has many footnotes and references for those inclined to learn more.

[Tom · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was very aware of the October 2005 wine storage facility fire that destroyed millions of dollars of fine wine because my brother-in-law was directly impacted negatively by the fire. He lost an entire vintage. But what made the book even more interesting was the history of the California wine industry as told by the author. From its early history to the wine fraud scandals, all make for interesting reading. Not always the greatest prose, but certainly a good story.

[Pat · Rating 2 out of 5]

Couldn’t finish this. I found the author’s storytelling to be tangled and repetitive. I got through the first 100 pages but was bored. While it was interesting to learn more about California wine history, it just went on too long.

[Shayne · Rating 2 out of 5]

I found this book to be disjointed and a little repetitive. The core story revolves around Mark Anderson, an arsonist who destroyed millions of bottles of wine in the mid-2000s. But it also takes a meandering trail through 19th century California and the development of the wine industry in that state, then takes a sudden, unexplained turn into the world of wine fraud. Finally, at the end, it returns to Anderson's story, which is the most intriguing piece of the book. While I appreciate that the book was very well researched, not every tidbit that the author discovered in her research needed to be included in the book.

The author was seeking to understand how wine could inspire such passion in people that they are willing to go to extreme lengths to make it, buy it, fake it, sell it, or protect it. But that overarching goal got lost in some of the minutiae included in the narrative, as well as the lack of transition between the various parts of the book.

[Kurt · Rating 3 out of 5]

I find the subject matter really interesting but would have liked more information on Mark Anderson, the man convicted of arson of a wine storage facility. More information on his background, more interviews with the people who know him, more insight into the man.

A lot of the book goes into history of California Wine and how the author's ancestor fit into it. I found this interesting, but wanted more information on the arson and arsonist.

[Scott James · Rating 5 out of 5]

Once again Dinkelspiel tells an amazing, surprising story about the American experience, this time through the world of California wine. That glass you're drinking has a provenance that includes murder? A page turner, especially for wine lovers and anyone who loves their history mixed with a griping true crime tale. The author has done her homework, and the result is superb. Bravo.

[Smh624 · Rating 4 out of 5]

My family was directly involved in this astonishing and tragic story. The history of California wine making presented by the author was just the right amount to keep the book moving along and the details of the Wine Central fire and the investigation and prosecution were interesting even though I already knew most of the story. A well-written book.

[Natalie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Though the book had quite a few interesting details, the lack of a cohesive flow and order among all of the stories and historical time frames made the book hard to read. Lots of interesting facts about wine!

[Catherine Read · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thoroughly enjoyed Julia Flynn Siler's House of Mondavi which I read back in 2008. Both that book and Tangled Vines are non-fiction that read like a gripping novel.

The history of the wine industry in the United States is fascinating. Frances Dinkelspiel goes deeper into California's history than Siler did, and that indeed goes back to when California was a territory. The history that is intertwined with this "real crime drama" of arson starts back in 1839 with a 13,000 acre land grant to a Los Angeles merchant named Tiburcio Tapia. Rancho Cucamonga planted the Mission grape there which thrived enough to make wine, but not very good wine. It is still an important piece of putting together what is today's modern wine industry in California. Dinkelspiel weaves together how Rancho Cucamonga, with it's unsolved murders and intrigue, is connected to the arson at Wines Central in 2005 through the loss most of the 1875 vintage Port and Angelica made when her great-great-grandfather Isaias Hellman owned the Ranch.

There is also a well researched chapter on wine fraud. This is also an important piece of Mark Anderson's overall deception leading up to the fire that destroyed millions of dollars of fine wine and the entire wine libraries of several wineries. She delves deep into the greatest global wine fraud ever perpetrated by an individual sweeping up wine investors and auctions houses all over the world. Rudy Kurniawan is also behind bars serving time for masterminding the fraudulent sales of fake rare wines. Caught up in that fraud as an unsuspecting buyer was wine collector William Koch who financed his own team of experts and investigators to crack the case that led to the FBI arrest of Kurniawan. I've heard there is an excellent documentary on this out there online.

I enjoyed the book and thought is was a great education on aspects of the wine industry I had not considered before. It is also an interesting window into the justice system, plea bargains, and who decides what something is worth and what "value lost" means. It kept me turning the pages right to the very end.

[Meg · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed reading this book! The book details the arson act that occurred in October 2005 at the largest wine storage facility in California and all the negative, lasting effects that had on so many people and families, including the author's ancestors who owned a vineyard in Rancho Cucamonga. Bottles of their 1875 Port and Angelica were lost in the fire. She also discusses the history of wine making, starting out in Rancho Cucamonga, as well as detailing other instances of wine fraud throughout California history. It was a gripping book and made me really appreciate the effort, hardwork, and dedication that goes into making a really great bottle of wine.

[Barbara Switzer · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was well written and documented. The story has historical significance for the part of California where I live and also for the now famous northern wine growing regions of the state. The author is pursuing her ancestors' wine-making stories which brings another dimension to the book. I thoroughly enjoyed reading her account of the history of wine in California and one man's depravity and deception.

[Elise · Rating 3 out of 5]

Filing this one under, it should have been a long magazine article in the New Yorker.

[Tami DuBow`` · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am
Not a huge history nor wine connoisseur, but I do like both. I loved how this book brought alive the history of the wine from the very earth it comes from through the humans laboring to create wine from it. This was a challenging book to write, many elements, and I thought it did well. It makes me want to try some seriously d and pricey wine some day.

[Victoria · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well researched, easily digested.

[Katie Lawrence · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book is about so much more than just the fire and explosion. The personal histories, and many stories of wine development and fraud in CA are fascinating, from beginning to end. It bothered me a bit at first that she jumped around in time so much, but ultimately, it was an effective strategy. She writes well and it is thoroughly researched.

[Mal Warwick · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gold. Aerospace. Agriculture. Filmmaking and television. Computers and consumer electronics. Wine. Viewed through the lens of business and commerce, these industries dominate the history of the State of California. Examining any one of them as it has evolved over the three centuries since Spanish monks seized control of the land helps illuminate how California has become the wealthy and populous state it is today. In Tangled Vines, journalist Frances Dinkelspiel tells the colorful story of California’s wine industry, enriching our understanding of the state’s history — and she makes it read like a thriller.

Tangled Vines recounts the 18th-century origins of the state’s wine industry in the rising demand for sacramental wine for use in the Catholic missions that were the first centers of European settlement in California. For two centuries, Californios (Spanish-speaking settlers) dominated the field until the Gold Rush brought tens of thousands of English-speakers to the state, newcomers who gained the ascendancy through hard work, shrewd investment, as well as fraud and even murder.

As Dinkelspiel tells the story, California’s wine industry didn’t come into its own until late in the 19th century when it finally gained acceptance on the East Coast of the U.S. as an alternative to fine European wines. The industry flourished, its center of gravity moving from Southern California to San Francisco, until the advent of Prohibition in 1920 — and then collapsed. Revival, and the rise of Napa and Sonoma counties, came late in the 1960s through the pioneering efforts of Robert Mondavi. We all know the rest.

The focal point of Dinkelspiel’s tale is the tragic 2005 fire that destroyed as much as $250 million worth of wine stored at the cavernous Wines Central warehouse in Vallejo. Set by a 300-pound, self-styled wine expert named Mark Anderson in an attempt to cover up his theft over many years of millions of dollars worth of wine entrusted to his care, the fire occasioned years of shameful antics by Anderson to delay action against him in both civil and criminal courts. Only seven years after the fire was the arsonist and thief sent to prison for a 27-year term that would end after he turned 87.

From the recently canonized Father Junipero Serra to Mark Anderson himself, the tale related in Tangled Vines is crammed with fascinating characters. It’s a great read.

Frances Dinkelspiel, a former reporter for the San Jose Mercury-News and co-founder of the popular website Berkeleyside, is also the author of Towers of Gold: How One Jewish Immigrant Named Isaias Hellman Created California. Hellman, the author’s great-great grandfather, also figures prominently in Tangled Vines, which is her second book.

[Gail · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you're interested in wine, history, or crime, "Tangled Vines" is worth a read. Several parts of the book offer gripping, well-crafted narratives that kept me reading past bedtime, a feat generally only fiction can muster. Unfortunately, I was continually disappointed by a lack of the tightness required for a perfectly engaging read. Sentences like this one - "In late 1906, CWA began construction of Winehaven, which would become the world’s largest wine depot in the world" - were not infrequent, and information mentioned on one page reappeared on the next often enough to make me feel angry at being either underestimated or sold a product that wasn't quite ready for consumption. I also had trouble with the author's treatment of her own involvement. As an experienced journalist she probably felt bound to disclose her correspondence with Anderson and relationship to Hellman, but she could have mentioned those things in the introduction and then written the text entirely in the third person so as not to break up the tale. Additional editing could easily have fixed all these problems. That said, the subject matter is so interesting and much of the writing so good, that I'm glad I read it and would recommend others do the same. Should a second edition come out that's been cleaned up, I'll be the first to award it a fifth star.

[Carol · Rating 5 out of 5]

You will never look at wine in the same way after reading this book. Living in the San Francisco Bay Area, I visited the wine country probably too many times. Having grown up in SoCal, I didn't know about the history of the vineyards that started there in the mid-1800, well before the wine country in NorCal. This book is a wonderful historical read of how CA became known for their wines and the not-very-nice backstory and the consequences thereof that current huge conglomerate vintners who promote the old-world, family-owned businesses don't want you to know. It's about five murders surrounding a large vineyard in Rancho Cucamonga in SoCal in the mid- to late-1800s to a man who burns a wine storage business that causes vintner many billions of dollars of loss, only to find out their offsite wine storage was not covered by insurance, in 2005. They arrested a man in Arcadia, where I grew up, for producing inferior wine and selling it as premium, high priced wine. Pretty much a big business in and of itself. You will read about a problem that gave CA the edge over France in the race for the best wines reputation. A good and easy read.

[Hallie · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book really brought to life the darker side of the wine industry. The main story is the coverage of the Mark Anderson Wines Central fire saga - a fascinating read, particularly as it was spread out over so many years and impacted so many wineries. This is a nice compilation of the whole event and its aftermath. However, the author approaches coverage of the story from a personal angle as her family had some historic wine destroyed in that fire, and therefore uses part of the book to cover her family history and the creation of that wine. I found that link frankly unnecessary, and those chapters on the history of Rancho Cucamongo far too long for my liking - I would have preferred much less history and personal tie, much more coverage on the other wineries that were affected by the fire and how they coped. Overall, though, a really good read to get an understanding on the Mark Anderson story.

[Lori Dunbar · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is really two books in one. The main story is about an arsonist who torched a huge supply of stored wines valued in the many millions in 2005. The author then goes into detail about the history of wine in CA. It is evident that it is well researched. However, the extremely minute details and side stories got in the way of what I felt her main objective was for writing this tome. I actually liked the many details; the book just seemed structured in an odd way to me. I rate most books that I like at three stars. I feel compelled to give this one a two star rating for its meandering. However, if you are a lover of wine and/or CA history, this might just be your thing.

[Joan Mitchell · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was truly a tale of Tangled Vines. The history of wine making from the 1700s to present day in California. Sounnds boring but this was certainly not a boring book. I know nothing about wine but the story unfolded with murder greed etc and the same nefarious attitudes spanned the history of wine making. And this was just in California, just in part of California. It makes me wonder if the wine making across the world is so convoluted. A good book. I received this book from Goodreads for free.

[Gerald Wright · Rating 3 out of 5]

As reportage covering the fire set by Mark Anderson that burned down a wine warehouse in Vallejo in which a tragic amount of wine was lost, the book is not bad. The early California wine history was interesting - particularly that on Southern California as I didn't know so much about it. But as for writing about wine in general - wine collecting and tasting, wine collectors, makers, aficionados.... the writing seemed cliched at times. Dinkelspiel is generally accurate... but she did make a couple of howlers - such as referring to Chateau Cheval Blanc as a "prized varietal."

[Christina Tsafoulias · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great book club choice! A non-fiction book with a real narrative, written by a journalist with a true sense of story. This definitely appealed to the wine nerd in me and kindled my curiosity even further about the wine world and its crazy adherents.