Tangled Vines

by Frances Dinkelspiel

  * * *

  When the consulting winemaker for Long Meadow Ranch, Cathy Corison, heard that the fire had ruined the winery’s entire 2002 vintage, some of the 2001, and numerous large-format bottles from other years, she went into shock. Words virtually left her. For three days she mourned in near-silence, torn apart inside by the realization that the wine she had labored over for so long had essentially been evaporated. Long Meadow Ranch had stored its wine almost directly below the spot where Anderson had his wines. So the winery’s shrink-wrapped pallets had been among the first to collapse in on themselves, shattering bottles and leaking red wine out onto the cement floor.

  * * *

  The conversation Ted Hall had with Miranda Heller, the woman who had entrusted about 175 bottles of the wine made by her great-great-grandfather in 1875 into his care, was not easy. Hall had met Heller when they both served on the board of a private elementary school in Marin County that their children had attended. They also shared a love for the San Francisco Symphony. Heller had turned to Hall as an expert she could trust, and he had the feeling that he had let her down. While Heller hadn’t made the wine that burned, hadn’t personally toiled to blend it, she nonetheless felt a strong kinship to the destroyed Port and Angelica. The wine had sat for decades in Heller’s grandmother’s house in Atherton on the San Francisco peninsula. Heller had taken possession of the dozens of wooden cases upon her death. She had sent them to Hall to be examined, and he and Fritz Hatton, a consultant and the auctioneer for the Napa Valley auction, determined that the wine was sound. They thought it should be drunk soon, though. They recommended that Heller create wooden cases that would appeal to collectors interested in historic wines. They suggested packaging six bottles to a box: three bottles of Port and three bottles of Angelica, a sweet, fortified white wine. At recent auctions, similar bottles of Heller’s ancestor’s wine had sold for more than $400 each.

  It was ironic that, in looking to protect the old wine, Heller had sent it to Hall. That move from family wine cellar to professionally managed wine warehouse had led to its destruction. To Heller, the 130-year old wine symbolized her family’s legacy and the bounty of California. If only she had left it alone. Now it was gone.

  * * *

  As the weeks passed, word spread about what the fire had destroyed. Most of the ninety-five wineries affected by the fire had been small, family-owned operations that produced fewer than 10,000 cases a year. A few, though, only made a few hundred cases a year. A number of large corporate wineries also lost wine. Most of the wineries were located in Napa or Sonoma counties, but there was also wine from Paso Robles in central California, and the states of Washington and Oregon.

  Some of the wine filled a niche market, like Marilyn Wines, which put a picture of Marilyn Monroe on every bottle. Their wines had been on the mezzanine level. There were celebrity wineries, like one owned by the Italian racecar driver Mario Andretti. Realm Cellars, which had only released three hundred cases in 2003 from one of Napa’s most storied vineyards, To Kalon, saw its entire production destroyed.

  Saintsbury was not the only winery that had lost its library wines and its history. ZD Wines, owned by the deLueze family, lost its library, including a 1969 pinot noir, which many regarded as the first commercial Pinot Noir to ever come out of the Carneros region. Now there were no liquid records left of those early days. Signorello Estate, which started making wines from its vineyards off the Silverado Trail in 1985, also saw its earliest vintages destroyed.

  Numerous small wineries that had just been getting their start suddenly found themselves with nothing to sell. Poorly capitalized, they couldn’t even struggle to stay afloat. Many of them discovered that they did not have insurance. Many insurance companies declared that the wine at Wines Central was “in transit,” moving from the winery to restaurants, and thus was not insured. While companies insured wine at the wineries, the policies didn’t cover wine on the move.

  Before the fire, Allen Christensen had been rejoicing that Amazon Ranch, his brand new winery, had just gotten a positive review in a major magazine. He hoped that would impress the name of his fledgling label into the mind of wine aficionados. Christensen soon found that his insurance company would not pay for the 141 cases burned beyond recognition. Gary Lipp and Brooks Painter had just started Coho Wines, named for the “salmon of knowledge,” which focused on making cool climate wines. They lost 988 of the winery’s 1,000 cases of the 2003 vintage. The sale of the remaining twelve cases would not sustain them. Insurance would not cover their losses either. Sterling Vineyards, one of Napa’s oldest wineries, now owned by the multinational Diageo, was also uninsured. It lost about $37 million in wine in the fire.9

  Sean Thackrey wasn’t insured, either, but the maverick art dealer turned winemaker tried to be creative with his damaged wine. He wasn’t the kind of man to pay close attention to convention anyway. Thackrey, with a wild head of gray hair that he rarely combed, had set up his winery in a redwood barn in Bolinas, a small coastal town in Marin County that was only accessible by an unmarked windy road. It was more than an hour’s drive to Napa, where Thackrey sourced his Zinfandel grapes from a vineyard that had been planted in 1905. Thackrey was famous for his collection of more than 800 ancient texts that informed his approach to making wine. Instead of crushing grapes and letting their juices ferment, like most winemakers, Thackrey had been known to let the fruit sit intact for days, sometimes under the stars (the reason his wines are named after the constellations) while the sugars converted to alcohol. Only then did he press out the juice. It was a technique written about by the Greek poet Hesiod in 8 BCE.

  When Thackrey found out that he was not insured for the 4,000 cases he had stored in Wines Central, he swore at his agent, and then got to work. Thackrey decided to see what he could salvage. He tested some of his wine that had been at the edges of the warehouse and decided it tasted fine. There was no hint of char, no off flavors. So he slapped on a new label and sold the wine. That way he could bring in income without damaging his brand.

  Other winemakers did the same thing. John Caldwell, who was widely known for smuggling French vine cuttings in from Canada in 1983 at a time when the U.S. banned foreign vine imports, bought back his scorched wine from his insurance company. Caldwell thought the wine made from grapes from the Coombsville section east of the city of Napa tasted all right. He relabeled it. The wine had originally been called Rocket Science. The new title was Reentry.

  Julie Johnson of Tres Sabores winery in Rutherford had stored close to 2,000 cases in Wines Central. She used some of the scorched wine to make a fire-roasted Zinfandel and pomegranate marinade that she called ¿Porqué No?, or Why Not?, after one of the vintages that had been destroyed. It was so tasty that Johnson not only sold the sauce in her tasting room, but in boutique shops like the Oakville Grocery. Her favorite way to enjoy it was as a marinade for a blue cheese and bacon hamburger.10

  These winemakers refused to let the fire defeat them, a resilience they had used to make their way into the highly competitive California wine market.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  JOE SAUSALITO

  Mark Anderson eased his vintage burgundy Cadillac into the garage of his apartment building in Sausalito, a town of 7,000 people seven miles across the bay from San Francisco. It had been a grueling and emotional few days. Anderson’s father, James, was battling cancer, and appeared to be near the end of his fight. Anderson had driven to Yountville in the heart of the Napa Valley a few days earlier to see him at the Veteran’s Home, a massive white building that was home to more than a thousand men who fought in America’s wars. Anderson’s father had been a merchant marine in World War II. The visit was a good-bye, although the elder Anderson would not die until right before Thanksgiving. It was also Anderson’s alibi. “The last day I saw him alive was when I gripped his hand farewell, as he struggled to speak, writhing in pain,… in Yountville, October 12, 2005 at about 4:30 p.m., just about the time the fire was raging at Wines Central in
Mare Island,” Anderson wrote me years later. “My thoughts were on family matters, not business or wine.”

  Anderson had ignored the urgent phone calls that had come in the last few days from the various police agencies requesting an interview. The Vallejo Police Department, the fire department, the ATF—they all wanted to talk to him about the Wines Central warehouse fire. Anderson had graduated from San Francisco Law School, although he had never passed the California bar, and knew he wasn’t legally obligated to answer any questions. He was an expert at the non-answering answer, something he had learned in the last year as civil and criminal complaints had piled up. He regarded delay as a powerful tactic.

  So on October 16, 2005, four days after the fire, Anderson heaved his large body out of his car and started the climb up to his third-story apartment. The older and heavier he had gotten, the more difficult the ascent. At fifty-six, with a bad back and other ailments, walking up that steep flight of stairs could be downright painful.

  But Anderson didn’t consider moving. The apartment at 895 Bridgeway offered unobstructed views of the Sausalito harbor. Every time he looked out his picture windows, Anderson could see sailboat masts bob up and down with the changing tide. Harbor seals sunned themselves on the docks and pelicans and black cormorants swooped up and down. The view of Richardson Bay had enchanted him ever since he had moved in twenty years earlier. It still gave him pleasure.

  Anderson lived in the apartment with Cynthia Witten, his girlfriend of more than ten years. The two had met in 1978 when both of them were working in Japan and had started dating a decade later. Witten, originally from Oregon, had pale skin and raven hair. She had worked in real estate in Japan, but was working at the time at Pegasus Leathers on Princess Street in the tourist section of the town.

  Sausalito, the first city across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco, was a small enclave noted for its views, artistic community, and bohemian ways. Sally Stanford, who ran one of San Francisco’s most notorious bordellos in the 1940s, was elected mayor in 1975, just one of many alternative lifestyle seekers who settled in the bayside town. They were drawn to the water, with its whimsical collection of houseboats, or to the hills with houses that offered spectacular views of San Francisco and the bay. Thousands of tourists strolled the city’s waterfront promenade lined with eclectic shops and art galleries each year.

  When Anderson first moved to Sausalito in 1967, he had come, like so many before him, seeking freedom and creative expression. Anderson had been born in Berkeley in 1948 during a time when that city was more Republican than radical. His family was well-to-do (the 1944 marriage ceremony of his parents, James and Patricia, at the St. Clement’s Episcopal Church in Berkeley had been featured in the local newspaper) and he grew up on Brookside Avenue in a wealthy enclave near the Claremont Hotel, a 1915 building that served as a local landmark. Mark and his brother, Steven, who was born in 1953, had the kind of idyllic childhood that involved flattening pennies on the trolley tracks and sneaking into the hotel to ride down the circular slides that served as the building’s fire escapes. Anderson attended John Muir Elementary School and was a member of the junior traffic patrol, which helped students cross the street. In 1957, Anderson won the citywide fishing derby off the Berkeley pier.

  When Anderson was eleven, his family joined the growing exodus of people moving to the suburbs. Orinda, just over the hill from Berkeley in rapidly growing Contra Costa County, was a town with curving streets and cul-de-sacs, large oak trees, and much warmer summers. Anderson’s father took advantage of the growth; he built a successful mortgage brokerage that catered to the new arrivals.

  Anderson’s involvement with a pipe bomb two years later may have been a reflection of his boredom or of his cleverness and love of tinkering. When he was thirteen he brought home a pipe bomb (he later said a classmate gave it to him) and hid it in a closet that separated his bedroom from his brother Steven’s bedroom. The bomb exploded one night, ripping a six-inch hole in the wall and shooting shrapnel near where Steven was sleeping. The fire marshal who came to inspect the damage said the blast could have been fatal. That incident may be when the fissure between the two brothers appeared, a crack that would grow so wide that they eventually stopped talking to each other. Steven Anderson clearly never forgot the incident; he kept newspaper stories about the blast for forty-five years and later presented copies to a reporter.11

  Anderson moved to Sausalito in 1967, when he was nineteen. It was the height of the hippie era, and Anderson had grown his hair long and had spent time wandering Telegraph Avenue near the UC Berkeley campus, where street vendors burned incense and sold leather bracelets and decorative candles.

  Anderson was attracted to the Sausalito waterfront, a picturesque community of more than 200 boats, tugs, ferries, and old submarine chasers that had been transformed into fanciful and ornamental floating homes. There was a bohemian feel to the community, with people gathering for communal dinners, sharing their possessions, walking around nude, or painting on a dock. The vibe was laid-back, the rent was free, and the sense of being an outlaw from a restrictive society was strong. In 1967, Otis Redding wrote an ode to the scene, “Dock of the Bay,” while on a houseboat.

  “People lived here because they could afford it,” recalls one old-timer who bought his first boat in 1967. “You could find an old lifeboat hull to build on, and there was always stuff to recycle because of the shipyards. Whatever you wanted. If you needed a beam of wood ten feet long by one foot wide, one would come floating up.”12

  Anderson was handy and within a few years he had constructed a thirty-six-foot long A-frame houseboat on fiberglass pontoons for about $3,000. When he sat on his dock, holding a glass of wine, he could look out over the water and see sea lions basking in the sun on the docks, or pelicans swooping down to catch fish.

  * * *

  Almost forty years later, Anderson was entrenched in the town’s establishment. He was a member of the Rotary Club and served on the board of the Chamber of Commerce. He had been appointed to the Parks and Recreation Commission and the Arts Commission, and was almost single-handedly running Sausalito’s Sister City commission. But for all his civic engagements, in the food-obsessed Sausalito he was best known for his love of sushi.

  * * *

  Anderson’s fame stemmed from his patronage of Sushi Ran, a Japanese restaurant on a small street on the edge of Sausalito’s downtown. Sushi Ran had sort of sneaked up on the residents of Sausalito. For years the top restaurant in town had been the Trident, a bayside restaurant started by the music group the Kingston Trio in the 1960s. The Trident had tapped into the cultural zeitgeist with its natural food and creative cocktails and had attracted celebrities like Janis Joplin, Jerry Garcia, and Joan Baez. The Trident got really famous when concert promoter Bill Graham threw two private parties for The Rolling Stones there in the early 1970s.

  Yoshi Tome took over a nondescript Japanese place in 1986 with the goal of transforming it into a top-notch restaurant that would attract politicians, business people, and Sausalito’s artists so often that they would come to regard Sushi Ran as a second home. Tome hit upon the idea of launching the Sushi Lovers’ Club, with a Hall of Fame for the most loyal patrons. Those who racked up dozens of visits could have their photos prominently displayed on the restaurant’s front wall.

  From the start, the Sushi Lovers’ Club was a hit. People who might have visited just a few times a year started coming frequently. They wanted to see their photo on the wall. “The competition was unbelievable,” said Tome.

  It helped that Tome had brought in a talented chef who wowed patrons with his intricately sculptured towers of sushi, tempura, and sashimi. Tome imported the freshest fish from the famed Tsukiji Market in Tokyo and stocked his cellar with one of the best collections of sake around. The food earned glowing reviews—and three stars—from the San Francisco Chronicle and was anointed one of the best restaurants in the Bay Area by both Michelin and Zagat. Sushi Ran soon felt exactly how
Tome had hoped—a hometown draw.

  Anderson soon became a regular, often walking the four blocks from his apartment “to the Ran” for lunch. His favorite dish was Ten-Tama Soba: buckwheat soba noodle soup with a raw egg cracked over the broth and a few pieces of shrimp tempura piled on top. He often stopped by late at night as well to drink wine or sake and share gossip with Tome at the bar. The pair became close friends.

  Many people still carry images in their head of Anderson at Sushi Ran—laughing, telling jokes, hanging out with Sausalito’s politicians and civic leaders. Martin Brown met Anderson at Sushi Ran around 1992—and found him “really witty, really enchanting.” Brown had just started a new alternative weekly newspaper called The Signal and he invited Anderson to contribute after he saw him doodle amazing illustrations on a napkin. Anderson eventually started to write a column about the town’s politics and culture under the pen name “Joe Sausalito.”

  All those visits earned Anderson a spot on the Sushi Lovers’ Hall of Fame wall. His photo first went up in 1987 after he had made 100 visits, the fourth most of any customer. In 1994, he won the number one spot, visiting 211 times. He won again in 1996 after visiting 195 times. His biggest competitors were his friends, other food-oriented people like Jack Rubyn, the chair of the Marin Food and Wine Society. In 1995, Rubyn took the number one spot after he ate at Sushi Ran 458 times. Anderson came in second that year by eating at the restaurant 192 times. All together, Anderson ate at Sushi Ran more than 2,000 times.

  “Mark turned it into an absurd competition,” said Tom Stern, a Sausalito journalist. “He would go there every day. For three years, he had more than 365 visits. He wanted to be number one. He would go there and order a glass of wine and that would count as a visit.”