Over the next decade, as nonconformity became hip, Americans started to drink wine as a way to differentiate themselves from the conventionalism of the times—which led to the boom that transformed the Napa Valley. The number of acres planted to grapes doubled between 1966 and 1976. Zinfandel finally triumphed over Carignane—suitable for blending into jug wines—as the most widely planted grape.63
Anderson learned to appreciate wine just as the revolution for varietal wine was taking off. Anderson was a lanky teen when he started traveling regularly to Santa Rosa in Sonoma County to attend junior college. Over the years, he explored the back roads of the region. Wine tasting was almost a casual affair then. It wasn’t necessary to make an appointment. A visitor could just go to a winery and ask to sample whatever was on hand.
Anderson used to like to visit the A. Pagani Winery, a 187-acre winery off Highway 12 in the Glen Ellen section of Sonoma County. The patriarch of the family, Felice Pagani, had planted his first grapes in 1912, and his son Louis (whom Anderson and others called Old Man Pagani in the 1960s) ran an informal tasting room. Visitors could pull in with an empty jug and Pagani would fill it from the barrel for fifty cents. The red wine was a field blend made from Petite Syrah, Alicante, Grand Noir, and Lenoir grapes. Sometimes Pagani would join Anderson and his friends for a picnic under the fruit trees that dotted the property.
The Paganis shut down the winery in 1969 and shifted toward selling their grapes. In 1997, Wine Spectator named a Ridge wine made from that same Pagani field blend one of the best wines in the world.
That same informal atmosphere existed in Napa Valley. While the Napa Valley Vintners Association, a trade group, had erected two large wood signs along Highway 29 in 1949 welcoming visitors to this “world famous wine growing region,” the words weren’t quite true then. A few wineries, like Charles Krug, had tasting rooms, but the tourist traffic wasn’t heavy. A handful of new wineries had opened up, like Stony Hill, famous for its lean Chardonnay, but they were hidden in the hills. Wine tasting was elevated to a new level, however, when Robert Mondavi opened his winery along Highway 29 in 1966. Clifford May designed the winery to be reminiscent of the missions that once dotted the state. Its signature arch and tower would soon adorn the label of every bottle of Robert Mondavi wine.
Mondavi, determined to make great California wines and to encourage people to drink them frequently, was a visible presence at the winery. Anderson remembers seeing and talking to him when he visited the winery.
There was a sense of adventure, of new things happening in the world of wine, and Anderson jumped right in. When he first went wine tasting he didn’t know much about what made a good wine, or even who the local winemakers were, but he soon found out. He had a feeling he was learning as the winemakers were learning to make premium wines, and Anderson liked the idea of that inside connection.
In 1976, after graduating from UC Berkeley with a degree in economics, Anderson moved to Asia, where he began to delve more deeply into wine. In Tokyo, he fell in with a group of older, affluent Japanese businessmen who were wine aficionados. They liked to meet at night in a European-style restaurant or Japanese-style inn in Tokyo or Osaka and drink bottle after bottle of sake or wine. They would eat, laugh, and drink, often into the wee hours of the morning. They called themselves the “Kansai Wine Club,” after a southern-central region of the main island. “The format was fairly typical: select a three-star restaurant, work with the chef to design a stellar selection of entrées … and pair the food selections with the best wine available,” said Anderson. The businessmen would fly in from all parts of the world for “a fabulous dinner, fellowship and the very best in wines, cigars, sharing tall tales and enjoying a weekend of trying new restaurants.”
Despite the difference between his age and that of the majority of those in Kansai Wine Club, Anderson, who was then in his early thirties, felt right at home. They all shared an appreciation for the finer things in life. Perhaps the men enjoyed how thoroughly Anderson embraced Japanese culture. His Japanese was good—although he definitely understood more than he could speak—and he had an understanding of the way things worked.
Soon, Anderson began traveling with members of the Kansai Wine Club—or so he claims. They went to France, he says, where they explored the castles of Bordeaux and the small towns in Burgundy. They went to Italy to sip Chianti and taste Brunello di Montalcino. They tasted wine inside the Great Pyramid in Egypt. At a celebration on a small coral atoll near Bora Bora in the South Pacific on the eve of the 1996 New Year, Anderson dined with a group of rich Japanese businessmen on the beach under a night sky brilliantly lit by stars. They feasted on lobster, monkfish, and giant beluga, and washed it back with vintage Champagne.
Some of the tastings were decadent, such as the one Anderson did of 100-point wines of ten châteaux properties across Bordeaux. Or the “Belle Époque,” tasting of five châteaux from five years of the nineteenth century.
What did Anderson learn from these outings? If you asked Debbie Polverino, the manager of Wines Central, not much about wine. She always thought he bluffed his way through his descriptions and didn’t convey any deep understanding of what made a particular vintage bad or good. Then perhaps Anderson learned how wine was a portal, a way to lubricate relations between people who spoke different languages and who had wildly divergent living standards. Wine provided him access to a world whose door might otherwise be closed.
CHAPTER TEN
FOR THE LOVE OF WINE
Sausalito Cellars threw open its doors for business on August 15, 1999. Its shelves already held wine from unclaimed cases Anderson had purchased from two San Francisco wine storage facilities that had gone out of business. Anderson also had cases from friends from Japan and Hong Kong who had bought wine while visiting the vineyards of Napa and Sonoma. Import taxes on wine were high in both countries, so some friends chose to leave their wine behind to consume at a later date.
Ron Lussier, a web designer, became one of Anderson’s early customers. Lussier, a stocky, bearded computer programmer with an easy laugh, had not been interested in wine as a young man; he had grown up in a teetotaling family. Alcohol was never served at their dinner table.
But Lussier had a wine epiphany at a romantic dinner in Washington, D.C. He and his boyfriend had gone to the capital to participate in a protest march. At a restaurant after the demonstration, they asked the sommelier for a bottle of wine. He brought them a bottle from a small winery in Santa Barbara called Sine Qua Non. The winery, founded in 1994 by Manfred Krankl, a high-profile Los Angeles restaurateur, makes extremely small batches of red Syrah-based blends with whimsical and colorful labels. Sine Qua Non means an essential condition, a thing that is absolutely necessary. From the first vintage, which yielded four and a half barrels, the wine has been a hit, widely coveted and difficult to obtain.
One sip changed Lussier’s life. He could taste the earth, the sun, the sky, and the steady hand of the winemaker in that glass. The flavor lured him into a dimension he had never known existed. The wine enhanced the evening, turning a special occasion into an exceptional one.
From that point on, Lussier began to collect wine, with a special focus on Sine Qua Non, which was part of a new trend called the “Rhone Rangers,” which used Syrah and Grenache rather than Cabernet Sauvignon as its main grapes. The wine was extremely difficult to find. Krankl only made small amounts and sold most of it through his winery mailing list. But there was a five-year wait to get on the list (now up to ten years) so Lussier had to search out the wine from people who resold their allotment. Lussier had a list of wine stores he kept on speed dial. He would telephone them on a rotating basis. If they had any Sine Qua Non, Lussier would rush out of work and drive to the store to buy it. Bottles cost as much as $350, but to Lussier, they were worth it.
When Lussier had too many cases stacked up in his San Francisco apartment, he went looking for wine storage. He found Sausalito Cellars listed online and was impressed. The cellar pro
mised constant monitoring, online inventory control, and video monitoring. There was pickup and drop-off delivery, too.
Lussier got in his car and drove over the Golden Gate Bridge to check out Sausalito Cellars. The reality was different from the advertisement. The small storage unit in the Marinship area of the waterfront was so jammed with boxes that there was little room to navigate. The cases were stacked floor to ceiling and clients’ wines were comingled. But Lussier, who bonds easily with others, was a trusting sort, so he didn’t think badly of Anderson’s obvious disorganization. Besides, he liked Anderson. They were both photographers and they talked about cameras. Anderson was also funny. So even though the storage cellar was a mess, Lussier moved in his cases.
Michael Bales, a Latin teacher from Toronto, and his wife, Margaret, also found their way to Sausalito Cellars. Bales was fascinated with Napa wine, particularly high-end Cabernet Sauvignon, and over the years had made his way onto the mailing lists of some of Napa Valley’s most exclusive cult wineries. That meant he was permitted to buy a few bottles every year from Bond, Bryant Family Vineyards, and Dalla Valle—wine that sold on the secondary market for thousands of dollars a bottle. Bales even had a few bottles of what some people regarded as the most sought-after wine in the world: Screaming Eagle. The winery, then owned by Jean Phillips, only produced about 400 cases of wine each year from its fifty acres of Cabernet, Merlot, Petit Verdot, and Cabernet Franc grapes in Oakville. The winemaker was Heidi Peterson Barrett, considered one of the top winemakers of the valley. Many considered her to have a magic touch, balancing the lushness of Cabernet Sauvignon grapes with elegance.
Bales’s previous wine storage facility had stopped accepting direct shipments from wineries, so Bales needed a new place, preferably one near Napa that he could visit easily when he came from Toronto. Anderson assured him he could pick up his wine at any time. With that promise, Bales signed a contract on February 21, 2001, and soon sent about eighteen cases to Sausalito Cellars.
In May 2001, Sausalito Cellars landed its biggest client yet: Bacchanal, a restaurant that had opened in 1999 in a $1 million space in the Metropolitan Hotel, just minutes from the San Francisco airport. The restaurant served classic American fare like Caesar salad and steaks, but, as its name suggested, it was best known for its wine. The menu listed more than 100 wines by the glass, with thousands of other bottles in its cellars. But Bacchanal had sputtered and filed for bankruptcy. One of its partners, Samuel Maslak, needed a place to store 756 cases of wine, around 9,000 bottles, while he and his partner sorted out the details of the restaurant’s dissolution. He selected Sausalito Cellars and contracted to pay $600 a month for the service. By that time Anderson’s storage unit was overflowing, so he rented an adjacent building, effectively doubling his business. He now had 800 square feet.
On the surface everything looked good for Anderson. In the summer of 2000, he went on an extended trip to France. Anderson loved to eat and he delighted in finding great restaurants and hotels in little-known locales. Anderson and his girlfriend Witten traveled to a small town near Tours in central France and stayed at La Croix de la Voulte, a country inn located in a fifteenth-century building. They ate at the best restaurant in nearby Saumur, Les Délices du Château, which overlooked the Loire River.
When Anderson returned from France, he wrote about his trip in one of his weekly columns for the Marin Scope. He started to travel so much around this time that the editor often included a note when his column did not appear. “Mark Anderson is on another adventure and was unable to find a modem or a fax. He’ll be back next week.”64
Perhaps it was the extended trip to France that caused financial troubles for Anderson. Or the visit to the truffle festival in Italy. Perhaps it was his notoriously sloppy bookkeeping, which meant he often neglected to charge clients their storage fees. Or perhaps it was just that he had finally tapped out his father and could no longer turn to him for a regular source of cash.
After his mother, Patricia Anderson, died of cancer in 1995, Anderson’s father, James, sold their home in Orinda and moved into the Veteran’s Home in Yountville. James Anderson evidently was a soft touch, eager to help his sons in whatever way possible. When Anderson needed money he asked his father. And asked again. And again. Anderson turned to his father for financial assistance so often that he eventually depleted his savings.65
Anderson’s younger brother, Steven, who worked as a handyman in the northern Sonoma County town of Windsor, apparently couldn’t prevent his father from repeatedly opening his checkbook for Mark. He grew incensed by his brother’s exploitation of their father. He cut off communication with Anderson and then channeled his hostilities toward his brother on his “Corpulent Raider” website. He called Mark Anderson a narcissist and a phony, a crummy artist, and a poseur. He wrote and posted a number of poems and offered it up as “A Christmas Sampler” to his brother.
“Run” by my Brother
Sausalito Cellars.
Mark Christian Anderson
Paid for with someone else’s money.
An Elder Person’s Money.
Appropriation by Intimidation
Stolen, Really.
Steven Anderson exposed how his brother could pose as a wealthy man.
Just for Today
Mark would get checks once, twice
a month for $4K, $5k, and on.
In addition to the cards.
How did he manage this?
By phoning up the Elder Man and saying
if he didn’t get the money Mark would be thrown
out of his Luxury Sausalito Apartment and
“would be Homeless.” Mark would then say he
would have to “Jump Off the Golden Gate Bridge.”
This would Scare the Elder Man.
So out comes the checkbook.
A check would be written.
And Mark runs off to yet another
$500 Lunch.
To celebrate with jaded local yups who think …
He is “Independently Wealthy”
or a “Successful Businessman.”
Steven Anderson suggested that Mark was manipulating their father:
The Elder Man?
Our Father. James Anderson.
Our Mother Died.
And it crushed him.
Lost his judgment. And was afraid.
Of what Mark might Do.
If he didn’t Play Ball.
But it didn’t matter. Mark has him
where he wants him.
Alone.
In an Institutional Cage.
It is unclear at what point Anderson realized that he had a huge amount of capital—liquid capital—in his possession. And it wasn’t money he collected from rents. It was wine, all those bottles of wine sitting in Sausalito Cellars, bottles of fancy Bordeaux and Burgundy, hard to find cult wines, and huge magnums of California Cabernet. They had cash value. If Sausalito Cellars wasn’t bringing in lots of money, perhaps there was another way to liberate its resources?
CHAPTER ELEVEN
WINE FRAUD
In the dark evening hours of November 28, 2013, at a time when most Seattle residents were just finishing their Thanksgiving dinners of roast turkey and stuffing, two men drove a large black SUV and a van up to a warehouse on the city’s south side. The industrial spaces, artists’ lofts, and galleries that gave the neighborhood, nicknamed Soda, its character, were quiet.
The men smashed the locks on the door leading into the warehouse. They ignored the cavernous room at the front, and instead headed into a small utility closet in the rear of the building. They pulled out some tools to cut through the sheetrock. When they broke through the wall, they had gained entry into Esquin Wine & Spirits, one of Seattle’s leading wine retailers and home to thousands of bottles of fine wine.
The burglars immediately made their way to a private wine storage area in Esquin’s basement, where dozens of temperature-controlled wooden lockers lined the room. Then the burglar
s acted with the precision of characters in a Mission: Impossible movie.
The two men had prepared for the theft. The previous night they had visited the wine storage room right at closing time. While the staff wasn’t watching, the men had thrown plastic bags over the motion detectors of the alarm system. Then they spray-painted the lenses of the surveillance cameras. The staff, eager to start their Thanksgiving holiday, didn’t notice.
So when the men broke into the storage area on Thanksgiving night, their movements were invisible. They were not afraid of getting caught. They went to work and methodically emptied the area of some of its most precious contents. They unscrewed the doors of storage lockers they had identified as containing valuable wine. They removed dozens of wooden boxes, which they transferred to a black Cadillac SUV waiting outside.
Over the next fifteen hours, the two men made nine trips in and out of the Esquin storage room. They whisked away 200 cases of wine worth an estimated $650,000.
The thieves were not done yet. They needed to cover their tracks and had the brilliant idea of setting the warehouse on fire. So they punched numerous small holes in the gas lines in the large front room of the warehouse. Then they ignited the gas coming out of a heater mounted near the ceiling, forming an impromptu pilot light. The men hoped that once the leaking gas filled the space, the pilot light would ignite, causing a huge fire that would destroy all evidence. Then the men departed into the early morning light, as silently as they had arrived.
Hours later, around 11:30 a.m. on Friday, November 29, the owner of Esquin came to work. He smelled gas. By some miracle the gas leaking into the warehouse space had not ignited. For some reason, the flames never ignited the gas lines. Esquin’s owner rushed to the building’s turn-off valve and stopped the gas at its source. He then alerted the police.
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