Tangled Vines

by Frances Dinkelspiel

  * * *

  Seven years earlier, Viader had invested in a dream: to make wine in Italy. She loved that country, with its emphasis on food, wine, and gentle living. While land was expensive, it wasn’t as costly as Napa Valley, where prime vineyard land could be $300,000 an acre. Viader got the idea to develop a small vineyard and eventually retire there.

  Viader knew where she wanted to plant grapes: in the increasingly respected area around Bolgheri, about seventy-five miles south of Florence in Tuscany. Italians had been making wine there for generations, wine that was well regarded, but had no special designation. It was table wine, or vino de tavola. But forty years ago, an ambitious group of winemakers started to blend Sangiovese grapes, the backbone of Chianti, with Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, and other varietals. Old-time Italian winemakers thought they were crazy. They denounced the invention. Most of the world ignored the controversy.

  But in 1974, two years before California wines gained recognition and respect at the famous Judgment of Paris tasting, a similar thing happened in Bolgheri. Decanter magazine, a well-regarded British wine magazine, sponsored a competition between French Bordeaux wines and those from Bolgheri. Guess who won?

  In the next twenty years the region became one of the most respected wine areas in the world. A few producers made rich, complex wines dubbed “Super Tuscans.” They began to be almost as esteemed as French Burgundy and Bordeaux.

  The popularity of the Super Tuscan wines meant that property was at a premium and difficult to find. Viader, who had an Italian business partner, scoured the countryside for years. They finally found a twenty-acre parcel near Bolgheri.

  Viader called the vineyard “Preselle,” which means small parcel in Italian. She later bought a farmhouse nearby. Viader traveled each month to Italy to oversee the vineyard and home, frequently taking her then seven-year-old son. He was soon speaking Italian fluently.

  But the Italian vineyard and its upkeep were expensive. Now that her income had been slashed—and now that the insurance company was denying her claim—Viader wondered how long she would be able to hold on to her retirement dream. The thought of losing it, though, tormented her.

  * * *

  A few weeks after the fire, Cathy Corison ran into Ted Hall at the farmers’ market in a park in St. Helena. The normally gregarious man looked shell-shocked, his round face a grim reminder of all that he had lost. Hall usually had a greeting for everyone, and was quick to offer his opinion on anything from the quality of the produce his ranch’s stand had for sale to the state of the American political system. But as Corison and Hall stood there among the eggs and end-of-the-year tomatoes, her former boss was uncharacteristically quiet.

  Corison could relate to Hall’s feelings of loss. She had been Long Meadow Ranch’s consulting winemaker for ten years while simultaneously starting her Corison label. She had been in charge of the 2002 vintage, the one that the fire had completely destroyed. Corison could remember the details of that harvest: it had been a cool ripening season, but an extended heat spell in the second half of September condensed the harvest, ripening all the grapes at once. Now none of it was left.

  Nor were the other vintages on which Corison had worked. The thought made her stomach turn. When the library area in the cave at Long Meadow Farm had filled up with bottles of previous vintages, Hall had sent them to Wines Central. It included large-format bottles, magnums and jeroboams of wine beginning with the 1994 vintage. The loss of all that history made Corison sad. Corison considered herself a steward of Mother Nature’s gifts. Each of the vintages she made was a snapshot of time, a reflection of that year’s weather and soils. The wines had also been made to age, to improve and develop over the years. The fire wiped out the chance to see that evolution.

  Corison greeted Hall. There wasn’t much to say. The pain in Corison’s eyes reflected the pain in Hall’s.180 As they looked at each other, Ted Hall began to cry.

  * * *

  In the weeks after the fire, Hall worried most about the fate of Long Meadow Ranch’s nineteen employees. The destruction of the 2002 vintage and some remaining cases of the 2001 vintage meant the winery had nothing to sell. With no income, how could he keep so many people on the payroll? The question kept him up at night.

  Hall knew he had to take drastic action to bring in money—and to keep Long Meadow Ranch’s name in front of the public. Before the fire, he had been pleased by how the winery’s reputation had grown. Hall had personally made 5,000 visits to wine stores and restaurants around the country to convince them to carry his wine. Those hard-won placements would now vanish since there were no new vintages to send them.

  Hall tried some unusual things to create cash flow. He decided to make grappa, a strong, clear Italian liqueur, from pomace, the leftovers from the pressing of the juice out of the fermented grape skins. It is usually thrown out or composted. Hall hired some flatbed trucks to cart away about three and a half tons of pomace. Hall sent it about sixty-five miles southeast to St. George’s Spirit, a spirit manufacturer in Alameda, an island near Oakland.

  Long Meadow Ranch had always been the type of winery that aged its wine longer than most and released it later than other wineries. These were all red wines, Cabernets that took time to reach their peak. But after the fire, Hall decided to upend his business model. White wine doesn’t need to be aged as long as red. Hall bought Sauvignon Blanc grapes and turned out 500 cases of white wine to sell.

  * * *

  Dick Ward found that people were gifting him bottles of his own wine. When word got out that Saintsbury had lost its 3,000-bottle wine library on the eve of its twenty-fifth anniversary, customers and clients started shipping back the older bottles they had ferreted away in their own cellars. The outpouring of support was remarkable, and moved Ward deeply.

  Saintsbury wasn’t the only winery that had lost its library. So many places had that the Napa Valley Vintners’ Association created a bulletin board on its website listing the wineries that had lost their histories. Soon, people from around the country had sent back old wines from those wineries.

  In late 2006, Sainstbury held the long-awaited party for its twenty-fifth anniversary. Dick Ward and David Graves rented a room at Per Se, Thomas Keller’s four-star restaurant in New York City’s Time Warner Center. Both men had been frequent visitors to Keller’s French Laundry and Bouchon in Yountville, and chose Per Se for that geographical connection. It was a theme that Keller also played up: the bright blue door leading into the modern Per Se in New York was the same color as the door leading into the rustic French Laundry in California.

  The guest list was a who’s who of East Coast publications. There were writers from Forbes, Food and Wine, Gourmet, the New York Times, and Decanter.

  Ward and Graves had laid out more than twenty vintages on tables around the room. They had managed to find examples of wine from almost every year of Saintsbury, thanks in part to the generosity of customers. They started with samples from the 1986 vintage. One critic later wrote, “Beautifully mature but still lively and appetizing, the wines from the 1980s and 1990s seem to prove the pair’s early beliefs were well founded.” The evening helped Ward put the fire behind him

  * * *

  For months the broken bottles of wine sat in the Wines Central warehouse as winemakers and insurance companies negotiated payments and coverage. Mold soon took over. It was a fertile environment. There was damp from the wine pooled on the floor, a foot deep in some spots. There was “food”—the wine. Slimy mold soon started to grow over the tops of everything: the sodden cardboard boxes holding the bottles, the heaps of broken glass, the charred wood. It was black, white, pink—and disgusting.

  Mold even grew inside the bottles. Debbie Polverino, the manager of the warehouse, said the corks and the bottoms of Ted Hall’s wine blew off because of the heat of the fire. His empty bottles were soon filled with white mold. I. W. Hellman’s Port was stored next to the wine from Hall’s Long Meadow Ranch. Those bottles were invaded by mold
as well.

  The smell was rank—a combination of sour wine, smoke, and decay. The mice and rats were so bad that Wines Central kept an extermination company on contract. They came regularly to set traps every few feet both inside and outside the warehouse. The Vallejo fire department hosed down the interior of the building a few times to clean it up and dissipate the mold and mildew.

  It wasn’t until a few months after the fire that disposal of the damaged bottles began. While most of the wine was ruined, winemakers could not destroy it before they settled with their insurance carriers and informed the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax Trade Bureau, the federal agency that regulated alcohol taxes, that it would be trashed.

  It took almost two and a half years to clean out the warehouse. Disposing of four and a half to six million bottles of wine, as well as numerous barrels, was no simple exercise. One winery, Sterling Vineyards, had to destroy 40,000 cases of scorched wine.

  Wines Central hired Upper Valley Disposal to come in with huge front-loaders to pick up pallets of wine. As soon as a vintner had the okay from his or her insurance company to dispose of the wine, UVD would search out the wine in the warehouse, pick it up, and carry it outside to a huge sorting machine. The boxes of wine would be dumped into a funnel-like mechanism. The machine would crush everything. The wine would go through a strainer into a 20,000-gallon tanker where it was carted off to be converted into ethanol. The wood, cardboard, and glass was sorted onto conveyer belts, removed, and stacked in the parking lot until it was dumped. The piles of wood, glass, and cardboard grew to be thirty to forty feet long and taller than a human.

  Delia Viader was one of the winemakers who came to watch the destruction of her wine. She needed to witness its demise, both for the insurance company and for her own sense of closure. On the day her bottles were set to be crushed, Viader left her winery on Howell Mountain, with its spectacular view of rolling vineyards and distant peaks, and drove south to Vallejo to a completely different vision of winemaking. The parking lot at Wines Central had become an industrial disposal center: loud, dirty, smelly, and distasteful. But Viader did not flinch from the mess. She wanted to see the end of the wine she had nurtured, the wine she had turned from grapes into something magical. She had helped create it, so it was only appropriate that she attend its funeral.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  THE TRAP IS SET

  The five pallets of wine came into the Chicago Wine Company by truck, arriving at the Wood Dale, Illinois, warehouse on October 11, 2005. After a forklift operator unloaded the 2,600 bottles, the shipment was given a quick visual inspection. Something was off. It looked like someone had blacked out initials written on some of the boxes and had pasted strips of paper over other identifying marks.

  The correspondence from the shipper was odd, too. The sender, Kansai Partners, wrote that they hoped to make $100,000 when the Chicago Wine Company auctioned off the wine. Yet the wine was worth more than $150,000. Why would a company purposely undervalue what it was selling? A staff member made a mental note to look further into the situation.

  The next evening, the wine company was abuzz with news of the fire in the Wines Central warehouse near Napa. There had been other wine warehouse fires in the past, but none were as large or as costly as this. As television stations around the country showed video clips of the plume of black smoke rising from the building, reporters mentioned that as many as 6 million bottles of wine worth $100 million were feared destroyed.

  To the woman who coordinated shipping for the Chicago Wine Company, there was something disturbingly familiar about the address of the burning warehouse. After pondering for a bit, she realized that Kansai Partners, the company that had sent the problematic shipment of wine, used the same address as the warehouse that went up in flames.

  Like other retail and auction houses, the Chicago Wine Company often did business without knowing much about its clients. In the case of Kansai Partners, the two men who said they owned the company, Peter Martin and Joseph Throckmorton, had communicated with the Chicago Wine Company by email. But when a staff member put the telephone number for Kansai Partners into Google, it came back as a number for Sausalito Cellars and a man named Mark Anderson. Another couple of computer clicks showed that the police were investigating Anderson in connection with the warehouse fire.

  The Chicago Wine Company got in touch with the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

  * * *

  Brian Parker, the lead ATF investigator, had been working on the assumption that he had a straightforward arson case. Of course there is never anything simple about arson. Most of the time there are no witnesses. Searching for the ignition point is laborious. ATF agents often have to build a circumstantial case one small piece at a time.

  The evidence collected from Anderson’s storage bay at Wines Central was damning. But the call from the Chicago Wine Company to the FBI, which referred it to the ATF, proved a propellant of its own. All of a sudden, Parker no longer had just an arson investigation. If Anderson had shipped wine from California to Illinois using a fake name, the criminal charges would include mail fraud. If that wine had been stolen, the charges would include interstate transfer of stolen property. To determine that would prove time-consuming. Parker had to figure out who actually owned the wine that had been sent to Chicago.

  Parker used the BlackBerry that police had seized during a search of Anderson’s apartment to compile a list of Sausalito Cellars clients. He then tracked as many of the 100 clients he could reach and found out what wine they had stored at Sausalito Cellars. He then compared that list to the wines sent to Chicago. It took Parker eighteen months to prove that at least 80 percent of that wine belonged to the clients of Sausalito Cellars, not to Kansai Partners, or Anderson.181

  * * *

  In the months after the fire, Anderson didn’t hide. Friends often saw him walking around Sausalito, near the small shopping district on Caledonia Street with its movie theater and hardwood store or along trails that ran by the bay. He didn’t seem worried or overly concerned about the pending embezzlement charges or the fact that various police agencies had twice stormed his apartment looking for evidence connecting him to wine theft and arson. Anderson still joked and told his stories. At meetings of the Rotary Club at the Sausalito Yacht Club, Anderson just brushed off the mess as an administrative mix-up, one that was sure to be sorted out eventually.182 When “I saw him … in the parking lot of the Sausalito Yacht Harbor, Mark was absolutely confident this would go away,” recalled Paul Anderson, the publisher of the Marin Scope (and no relation to Anderson). “Everything was absolutely fine; he was innocent.”

  There were signs of tension, though. Yoshi Tome threw a twentieth anniversary party for Sushi Ran in August 2006. He invited Anderson, his longtime friend and former member of the Sushi Lovers’ Club, for old times’ sake. Tome no longer regarded Anderson with affection. In a strange way, Tome felt responsible for introducing Anderson to many of his customers, people whose wine had been stolen or burned. Anderson had used his close association with Sushi Ran as a calling card to meet wealthy people who might become his clients, Tome thought. He couldn’t get the image out of his head of Anderson at Sushi Ran, holding a cup of sake, deep in conversation with a future victim.

  When Anderson showed up to the party, Tome was shocked by how much weight he had gained. He had ballooned to 300 pounds. His skin was a pasty white. He looked stressed. Yet Anderson acted as if nothing was the matter. He mingled, drank, and ate sushi as if he had not a care in the world.

  Shortly after that party, process servers bearing legal papers started to stalk Anderson to compel him to appear in court for the numerous civil cases his former clients had filed. Anderson laid low. He holed up in his apartment and didn’t answer his phone. He pasted cardboard over the small window in his front door, leaving a peephole three inches square. Even then he didn’t open the door to strangers.

  * * *

  Caffe Trieste, the Italian espresso bar and café at the edge of t
he Sausalito Yacht Harbor, was a favorite local hangout, a place to spend hours nursing a cappuccino or munching on a plate of antipasto. Mothers with toddlers were lunch regulars. Bicyclers returning from a ride on Mount Tam clustered around the entrance on weekends.

  The crowds let the undercover detectives mingle without detection as they scoped out Anderson’s apartment in mid-March 2007. Agents from the ATF and detectives from the Sausalito and Vallejo police departments set up an around-the-clock surveillance to determine Anderson’s habits. For three days straight they hunched over cups of coffee at the café that sat kitty-corner from the apartment or hunkered down in cars in a lot across from the duplex.

  Around ten a.m. on Friday March 16, 2007, Anderson and his girlfriend shut the door of their apartment and descended the steep flight of stairs toward the garage. Anderson leaned on his cane for support. When they got to the sidewalk, Anderson opened the garage door and eased his large frame into his Cadillac. Witten got in the passenger side. Before Anderson could pull out of the garage, a police car rolled up and blocked the way. An ATF agent got out, walked to the driver’s side, and asked Anderson to get out of the car. He was handcuffed and placed under arrest.

  “Mark, what’s going on?” Witten screamed. “What’s going on? Talk to me, Mark. Talk to me.”183

  Anderson didn’t say much as he was taken to the Sausalito police station, nor did he talk as ATF Agent Brian Parker sat down with him in a locked holding room. This was only the second time Parker had come face-to-face with Anderson; he had met him once before when he served a search warrant in late 2005. They had exchanged a few glib generalities then. But Parker had studied every aspect of Anderson’s life in the intervening months and felt he knew the man and his secrets.

  Parker pulled out a card to read Anderson his Miranda rights. “You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say and do can be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney…” and so on.