Tangled Vines

Greed, Murder, Obsession, and an Arsonist in the Vineyards of California

De: Frances Dinkelspiel

Narrado por: Dina Pearlman

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

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. 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.

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

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. Few people sipping a fine California Cabernet can even guess at the Tangled Vines where its life began.

©2015 Frances Dinkelspiel (P)2016 Audible, Inc.

Thought ready made the story move along and added drama but she should have done homework on pronunciations.

The author wove disparate stories and yet tied them together with the allure of the wine

I was put off by the readers absolute lack of know

was put off by the readers total lack of knowledge about the pronunciation of California towns and cities Wineries and French terms intergral to the wine business why on Earth would they pick this reader for this book. I enjoyed the story and I love the way the author weaved her personal story Into the book
but it was so annoying I just waited for the next problem-- like how do you pronounce sommelier how do you pronounce Charles Krug .

great story awful pronunciation

this book over all is great. There are so many historical stories about the wine industry. However, the person that read this book obviously knows nothing about wine. Her pronunciation of so many words is absolutely terrible. It is very close to Nails on a chalkboard, unfortunately. She did the author a complete disservice.

Bad Narration

The narrator had poor pronunciation. The subject and history was interesting and informative. I bought the book to accompany us on a trip to Napa.

very good book but so many mispronunciations

has someone in the wine business I found this book fascinating. the author did a great job of interweaving the multiple storylines and tying them all together by the end. Sadly the narrator is not familiar with wine industry and mispronounced so many of the wine regions and grapes.

Wine lovers' interesting professions

I learned so much about the innerrellated workers and investors as well as regions off California. this is a very well written andcresearched book. I highly recommend listening to the amazing narrator... a great skill for languages and nuances.

Very interesting story but the narration......

Would you listen to Tangled Vines again? Why?

Really enjoyed this story but the narrator's horrible pronunciation errors made it so hard to listen to.

Interesting but disjointed story

What did you like best about this story?

The portions of the story relating to Mark Anderson and the 2005 fire were by far the most captivating.

How did the narrator detract from the book?

I've been listening to audio books for several years now, and this ranks among the worst narrators I have heard. Her mispronunciation of key terms like "sommelier" really detracted from the listening experience, along with her totally unemotional, flat affect. The author states in the prologue that the entire point of her researching and writing the book was to understand the passions that wine arouses in people, such that they would be willing to run so far afoul of the law. But the narration demonstrates no passion at all; it may as well have been read by Siri or a robot.

If this book were a movie would you go see it?

Yes, if it stayed focused on the Mark Anderson story. I truly did not understand the diversion into 19th century California and the excruciating minutiae included in that bit of the story.

Poor narration

Would you try another book from Frances Dinkelspiel and/or Dina Pearlman?

The writing was good, but I would avoid this narrator in the future.

What was the most compelling aspect of this narrative?

It was a very interesting portrait of a con man. I didn't finish listening, but am planning to get the book from the library to read the rest of the story.

Would you be willing to try another one of Dina Pearlman’s performances?

Probably not. I was frustrated with the flat narration, but even more so by the poor pronunciation of names of people and places, and even of relatively common words of foreign origin (e.g. "sommelier"). It seemed to me a little briefing/practice before the final recording would have prevented this.

Was Tangled Vines worth the listening time?

It got me interested enough to pursue finding the book, but I can't recommend this recording.

No James Michener

Like a recoiling cue ball, this story bounces from very recent to distant past with not enough connection or continuity to make it worth the bounce. There is certainly a more rich and varied history to Ranch Cucamonga. Aside from the surprisingly, at least to me, attribution that the name Cucamonga came from a native American tribe of the region, much of the research is attributed to Wikipedia, the City's web site and other sources. The reliability is in question for many of these facts that are brought up with little or no verification. Mixed in with these are some first hand descriptions of documents and newspaper stories from the early 1800s. I was shocked to hear the author's explanation of early wine label art depicting the Roman god Bacchus with a pineapple as "a classic depiction" of the god. When pineapples were discovered in the Caribbean islands in the 1700s, this excludes the fruit from ancient Roman depictions.

The narrator makes good time with steady reading, but there is little in the story to motivate the listener to engage. The small vignettes of early vineyards in California as the wine industry developed could have provided a thread or two as we bounced mercilessly and pointlessly back and forth through time. There were many names dropped, but, for example, I am still wondering if the Rossi of the 1890s that she mentions is the same family of Martini and Rossi today. She doesn't say. And pardon me if I have lost track of the era she touches down in, revisits and slips through again out of order. My head is spinning. Dinkelspiel's story is more tangled than need be.

My disappointment is amplified because I find the crime she wrote about - the arson fire at the Wine Central Warehouse is mostly lost in the grand ramble. If there was a story worth telling here, it has gotten lost in the shuffle. I am guessing that Dinkelspiel was inspired by the style of James A. Michener, who, for those who haven't been exposed, liked to jump back to the beginning of the Earth to lead gently into a story. Michener always seemed to make the journey worth while. I've never seen it done well by anyone else.