Gather your drinks and snacks. Find a comfortable place to sit. And do this early in the day because, once you pick up Tangled Vines, Frances Dinkelspiel’s stunning new look at the dark side of California wine, you won’t want to get up until you’ve devoured the entire book.
Wine books, generally, are not known to be riveting reads. It is the rare volume that swallows its readers whole. Tangled Vines is that uncommon page-turner. Dinkelspiel has woven skillfully three distinct yet inextricable narratives into a book that will inform and fascinate readers for years to come. While the stories she tells are engrossing on their own, it is her steady journalistic tone, backed by prodigious and painstaking research, that gives this book its power and allure.
Subtitled “Greed, Murder, Obsession and an Arsonist in the Vineyards of California,” Tangled Vines juggles effortlessly the birth of the state’s wine industry in and around Los Angeles in the 1840s, the role played in the 1870s by her great-great-grandfather, Isaias Hellman at Rancho Cucamonga, and, finally, the destruction of the massive Wines Central warehouse on Mare Island in 2005 by Sausalito businessman Mark Anderson.
It is a tantalizing mix of California historical scholarship, true crime storytelling, and a personal quest to follow and understand the wines made by her ancestor Hellman, 175 bottles of which were destroyed by Anderson’s history-making arson. It is also an unsentimental examination of the corruption, ambition, and violence that have plagued the state’s wine industry since its infancy.(...)
Read the rest of ‘Tangled Vines’: A stunning look at dark side of wine (837 words)
By Thomas Riley. |
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Post tags: Frances Dinkelspiel, Mark Anderson, Murder, Obsession and an Arsonist in the Vineyards of California, Tangled Vines, Tangled Vines: Greed, wine, wine crime
