It was told in narrative non-fiction form, and was very gripping. 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's really three different books shuffled together. Few people sipping a fine California Cabernet can even guess at the Tangled Vines where its life began.Īs a wine enthusiast and collector I found this very interesting, but also a bit odd.

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. He was shot several times, dragged from a wagon and left off the main road for the coyotes to feed on. 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. 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. Sadly, Mark Anderson was not the first to harm the industry. 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.

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. 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. 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. On October 12, 2005, a massive fire broke out in the Wines Central wine warehouse in Vallejo, California.

These tangled vines book review