For many years, the California Central Warehouse was considered a safe place for winemakers and collectors to store wine. With its sturdy three-foot concrete walls, it was thought to be safe from earthquakes, forest fires and other natural disasters. Until, one day, it all went up in smoke. A fire destroyed 250 million dollars worth of wine, including entire wine libraries, vintages in transit to restaurants and bottles filled with California history. What sparked this fire? That’s a story of fraud, embezzlement, and deception… with a convicted criminal going to his grave saying he was innocent.
Listen Now: Vinfamous: Wine Crimes & Scandals
Episode Transcript
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ASHLEY SMITH, HOST:
Today’s tour through Napa Valley starts at Mare Island where not everything is as it seems. First of all, Mare Island isn’t actually an island; it’s a peninsula tucked away in the San Pablo Bay, 20 miles north of San Francisco. For decades, military vessels would pass under San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge, headed toward Mare Island’s Naval Shipyard. This three mile strip of land was a titan of the military industrial complex covered with hulking concrete buildings.
FRANCES DINKESLSPIEL, GUEST:
Urban lore says that the first atomic bomb that was deployed in Hiroshima was assembled in this particular warehouse. Whether or not that’s true…
ASHLEY:
30 years ago, the naval shipyard was decommissioned, leaving many of these buildings destined to be covered in barbed wire and no trespassing signs. But one warehouse would see a new life as the wine’s central warehouse. Winemakers from Napa Valley would store hundreds of thousands of gallons of wine here awaiting shipment. Wine libraries stored the samples of every wine ever produced by certain vineyards. Collectors would store heirloom bottles connected to the history of the American West. While Californians live under constant threats of forest fires and earthquakes, people thought of this warehouse as indestructible. But perhaps calling something indestructible is just tempting fate.
FRANCES:
The smoke coming out of the warehouse was so black that Vallejo firefighters described it as if a 747 had crashed into the building.
ASHLEY:
Bottles exploded from the heat. Red wine oozed down burnt boxes. The steel doors spread heat like a sizzling frying pan. When fire hoses sprayed water, it instantly evaporated into hot steam, causing firefighters to leap backward. Firefighters spent eight hours trying to control the blaze.
FRANCES:
The inside of the warehouse was wet. It was dripping wine. There were pools of wine on the floor. A lot of the boxes had been charred, and wine had tipped over onto the floor of the warehouse.
ASHLEY:
In one day, the wine’s central warehouse saw the destruction of $250 million worth of wine. What sparked this fire? How did an indestructible building the size of about two football fields get destroyed? Well, that story is infamous.
You are listening to Vinfamous, a podcast from wine enthusiast. We import tales of envy, greed, and opportunity. I’m your host, Ashley Smith.
This week on Vinfamous, the sparks that set flame to the largest fire in wine history. To understand why this fire occurred, we need to understand what was destroyed in October 2005. And to do that, let’s head north of Mare Island to the Napa Valley town of Deer Park.
Travel up a winding road to arrive at Howell Mountain, and you’ll come across a vineyard. Grapes grow upward in a classic French style following the steep mountainside.
DELIA VIADER, GUEST:
It’s really postcard perfect.
ASHLEY:
This is where DELIA calls home.
DELIA:
We’re up in the mountains overlooking a reservoir, which it’s like a 20 acre lake that frames the post guard. Vineyards coming up and down and surrounded by more mountains and more vineyards. We’re only 1300 feet above sea level, but it feels like you are in a different world.
ASHLEY:
Delia’s curiosity has taken her all over the world. She was born in Argentina, attended a German boarding school, and lived in Paris to earn her PhD in philosophy. She can converse fluently in six languages. In the early 1980s, she moved to the United States to get an MBA from MIT, and that’s around when she visited California’s Napa Valley and got the idea to create Viader Vineyards.
DELIA:
It really was not that romantic or glamorous. The wine business was not the right direct line between point A and point B, but it was an opportunity to raise my kids in a beautiful environment. I do believe that being close to nature and in a small place, it’s a beautiful educational background for raising kids. I still believe it, and I’m glad that my son considers that an important lesson that he wants to pass on. Wine was an opportunity.
ALAN VIADER, GUEST:
It was a great place to grow up, quiet and in a very slow-paced atmosphere. Little town, everyone knows everybody.
ASHLEY:
That’s her son, ALAN. He’s also part of the family business as the Director of Operations in wine-making. We talked to him while he was at their wine production offices, so you’ll hear some background noise. When Delia first moved to this property, it looked like a barren hillside covered in volcanic rock.
DELIA:
Our vines are what we call dynamite vines.
ASHLEY:
This rock is so hard that Delia and her team literally put sticks of dynamite into the soil in order to create holes in the soil to plant the grape vines. Now, they use jackhammers, but still it’s tough rock.
You might be wondering why I’m telling you about the quote “dynamite vines.” Well, this hard volcanic rock is the reason Delia and Alan couldn’t store wine in underground tunnels at the time.
DELIA:
Normally, I would’ve stored underground in our own facility and nothing would’ve happened.
ASHLEY:
So on October 12th, 2005, ALAN received a phone call from a vintner friend who also happened to be a volunteer firefighter. His friend was listening to the scanner when he heard something devastating.
ALAN:
He was a five alarm fire.
ASHLEY:
The wine warehouse on Mare Island.
ALAN:
He said, “Well, if you have your wine there, it’s not a good situation. It’s not a good site.”
ASHLEY:
Viader Vineyards was storing 7,500 cases of wine, their entire production that year.
ALAN:
There was a lot of firefighters going that way, and so he said, if I wasn’t doing anything to drop what I was doing and head out there, take a look. So that’s what I did.
ASHLEY:
Alan hopped in his car and drove south to Mare Island as fast as he could.
ALAN:
I remember driving out there, and as I was going over the bridge, we got a really good vantage point to the south where Mare Island is. You could see this huge column. Massive, massive smoke column, black. The closer I got to it, the more you could smell it, all the materials on all those pallets, all the plastic, all that stuff to me was just engulfing everything.
ASHLEY:
He parked his car and joined a few other people witnessing the smoke billowing out of the building. The firefighters were working diligently as flames destroyed his family’s work and livelihood.
ALAN:
They were still not able to get inside to stop the fire. They were just attacking it from the outside because of how thick the concrete walls were and how thick the ceiling was. That if somebody were to be inside and it collapsed, it would be devastating and tragic.
DELIA:
So it was a very heavy blow.
ASHLEY:
DELIA.
DELIA:
The wine was three quarters already sold and the money was already received, and I didn’t have any wine to give back.
ASHLEY:
Oh my gosh, that’s devastating.
DELIA:
It was a little bit of a pickle.
ASHLEY:
Yeah, absolutely.
All in all, more than four and a half million bottles of premium wine were destroyed in this warehouse fire. The wine came from 95 wineries. Wine from Sterling Vineyards, one of the largest winemakers in the state; long Meadow Ranch; and even race car driver, Mario Andretti’s Boutique Winery were affected.
Not all the wine was entirely destroyed. Some wineries turned this into lemonade. Well, so to speak. One winery used the affected wine to create a smoky fire roasted sauce. Days after the fire, Delia, Alan and a small group of their workers snuck into the warehouse to remove any existing bottles.
DELIA:
We were all kind of helping each other out. “Hey, I think I found a pallet of yours. It’s in between my pallet. My pallet fell on top of yours.”
ALAN:
To give you a visual, the warehouse stacks pallets and pallets are 56 cases, so four layers high, 14 cases per pallet, and they were stacked maybe five or six pallets, high and tiny little skyscrapers, and they’re all in cardboard. And when the firefighters were trying to put out the fire, they were soaking everything with water and foam. What happens when you get cardboard saturated with water, it collapses and then loses all its strength. So those skyscrapers, little by little, started collapsing on each other and it just creates this mountain of broken glass. I remember seeing huge sacks of sugar. And you’d see barrels, and then you kind of sift through and then, “Oh, there’s a bottle of mine,” and, “I recognize that capsule. I recognize that that bottle shape,” and this and that. It took us weeks, if not months, to do it.
ASHLEY:
Delia and Alan didn’t want a subpar, smoky product accidentally falling into the hands of consumers through what’s called the gray market, or buying wine outside of what’s considered the normal distribution framework. As winemakers were grappling with what’s next, law enforcement was uncovering how this happened. The three foot concrete walls kept the wine safe from earthquakes, but fire codes at the time didn’t require sprinklers.
FRANCES:
And that, of course, ended up being a fatal mistake.
ASHLEY:
Okay. And those really thick walls, they seemed to make it difficult for firefighters to bust through when the fire was happening. Right?
FRANCES:
Well, the thick walls meant that when the fire erupted inside, the place turned into an oven. The temperatures increased really, really rapidly and essentially cooked a lot of the wine.
ASHLEY:
That’s Frances Dinkelspiel. She’s a veteran journalist and a fifth generation Californian. She co-founded the community news organization Berkeleyside. In addition to reporting for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times, she reported on this fire in her book Tangled Vines, which is an excellent read by the way. And she has a personal connection to this fire, too.
FRANCES:
The core of my book talks about Port and Angelica that my great-great grandfather made in 1875, in Rancho Cucamonga, one of the earliest vineyards in California, down in southern California. And that wine was destroyed.
ASHLEY:
175 bottles of this wine were destroyed. The grapes in that wine were planted as early as 1839. That’s before California became a state.
FRANCES:
And of course, I was upset to hear this. I was sad. It seemed like history had been destroyed.
ASHLEY:
She says very early in the investigation, law enforcement saw signs of arson.
FRANCES:
They brought in the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to check it out. They brought in an arson dog named Rosie, and Rosie sniffed around in Mark Anderson’s storage bay. She indicated that she smelled an accelerant. ATF Agents knew pretty early on that an arson had occurred.
ASHLEY:
Mark Anderson. He was a man about town in Sausalito, an artistic town on the San Francisco Bay. He grew up in Berkeley, attended law school at UC Berkeley, and was struck with a passion for wine when the industry in Napa Valley was still developing.
FRANCES:
He moved to Sausalito where he built houseboats, and then he became a really big citizen of Sausalito. He was in the Chamber of Commerce. He helped organize the Sausalito Art Fair. He became very well known for eating at this restaurant called Sushi Ran in Sausalito, this wonderful Japanese restaurant. And at the time, the owner had like a board of Sushi Ran regulars who ate a lot of sushi, and Mark won first place a number of years. He’s a great dinner party guest. You would be happy to have him as your friend.
ASHLEY:
He claimed to have invented voicemail. He said he managed the rock band, Iron Butterfly. And on October 12th, 2005, the day of the fire, he said he was taking care of his dying father.
FRANCES:
But he also is a liar. He’s constantly exaggerating his past successes and his accomplishments, and you can never get a straight story out of him.
ASHLEY:
Mark did not invent voicemail. He had no connection to Iron Butterfly. And though his father was ill, he was not sitting bedside when the fire broke out.
Who was Mark Anderson? And more importantly, where was Mark Anderson the day of the fire? We’ll find out after a short break.
Mark Anderson ran a wine storage company called Sausalito Cellars. He would take care of people’s private wine cellars for a fee. By late 2014, he was storing his clients’ wine in the Wines Central Warehouse.
FRANCES:
There had only really been one person in the warehouse right before the fire had started, and it was this man named Mark Anderson. And he had been there that afternoon when the manager of the warehouse decided to shut down early, because it was in the middle of harvest and things were slow.
ASHLEY:
The warehouse manager, Debbie, asked an employee to tell Mark it was time to leave. Witnesses said he raced out of the warehouse, even though he was in poor health. He normally used a cane to walk. Then even stranger, after he left the warehouse, he called Debbie.
FRANCES:
Mark called her a few minutes later and expressed surprise that Debbie was still in the warehouse, that she hadn’t shut it down. Debbie thought this was really strange because Mark never called her on the phone. And then Mark went on to talk about how he was going to visit his father at the Veterans Center. Well, that ended up being Mark’s alibi, or he was trying to use that as an alibi. So he was presumably calling Debbie to establish that he was elsewhere when the fire erupted. And a short time later, the manager heard the fire alarm go off, and she and her crew went down to the warehouse floor and they saw this ball of fire. They escaped from the warehouse, luckily.
ASHLEY:
Mark appeared to be this lively, engaged citizen in the Bay Area. He would wax poetic about his love for wine, the whole purpose of his company, Sausalito Cellars was taking care of people’s wines. For a fee, of course. Why would a wine lover set fire to hundreds of thousands of bottles of wine? What was his motive for arson?
Let’s back up and look at how Mark was running his business, Sausalito Cellars. Was he a good steward of his client’s wine?
FRANCES:
A lot of people buy wine to age it, and they’ll put it in a storage facility and they’ll disappear for years. And so that’s very tempting. You figure you can take clients wine, they’re not going to notice it’s gone because they’re never coming to look at it. So I think probably Mark started off… Maybe he thought he’d replace that wine, but he started probably not really thinking he was going to turn into a full-fledged felon.
ASHLEY:
Mark built trust through his public persona, but behind the facade, he was strapped for cash. Mark’s father financially supported him and his business endeavors, even as his father fell very ill, and this enraged Mark’s younger brother, Steven. Steven even created an online persona named Corpulent Raider and debunked his brother Mark’s lies. He even accused Mark of conning their father to fork over money. But eventually, his father’s money dried up. He was desperate, and he saw an opportunity for fast cash.
FRANCES:
Particularly, in the early 2000s, it was easy to sell stolen wine. You could go on the internet and list it. You could often go to merchants, and they wouldn’t ask you for receipts about where you bought this wine. And that’s what Mark Anderson did; he ended up going to wine merchants and saying, I have the right to sell this wine, and they wouldn’t ask too much, and they would buy his wine and sell it.
ASHLEY:
Right. He’d be paid to store wine, and then he would secretly sell that wine, and so he was kind of being paid for the wine on both ends.
FRANCES:
Yeah. You’ve just described it. So I have a description of a man named Sam Mazlik who owned a restaurant in South San Francisco, and he and his partner decided to close the restaurant. So Sam moved dozens of cases of wine from the restaurant into Sausalito Cellars. He left that wine there for a very long time because he wasn’t reopening a new restaurant right away. And this is the wine that Mark, I think, sold first, because he saw that this guy was never showing up. Mark would take this wine to various merchants around the Bay Area and sell it. When Sam asked for his wine back and sent a truck and only got a few cases back, Mark gave him a very elaborate description of, “Oh no, Sam, you actually asked for 40 cases back on this date and another six cases back on that date,” and he creates sort of this fake narrative about how Sam had already asked for his wine.
ASHLEY:
This dear listeners is embezzlement. His customers would report the missing wine, but police had higher priorities.
FRANCES:
Customers didn’t know what to do about it. They eventually went to the Sausalito Police, and when the number of people complaining about Mark Anderson piled up, the Sausalito Police started to do an investigation, and the Marin County district Attorney finally brought charges against Mark Anderson.
ASHLEY:
Just months before the fire, Mark was indicted for embezzlement and theft for stealing his client’s wine.
FRANCES:
His name was flashed around the newspapers, so he immediately was regarded as untrustworthy, so he was losing business. People were asking to take their wines back. They always couldn’t take their wines back.
ASHLEY:
When clients asked about missing wine, he would tell them long roundabout reasons for how the wine went missing. Gaslighting them, essentially. In actuality, Mark couldn’t give his clients wine back because sometimes the wine didn’t exist anymore; at least not in Sausalito Cellars, which was actually being stored in the wine’s central warehouse.
With a legal case against him mounting and a trial looming, it appeared that Mark was going to have to face the consequences of his actions. Was everything catching up to this conman connoisseur? Not exactly.
On October 12th, 2005, Mark walked into the wines central warehouse with a bucket of gas soaked rags, intent on sparking flames to destroy evidence and cover up the embezzlement happening at his company, Sausalito Cellars. This is all according to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
FRANCES:
He would say, “I did not sell my client’s wine. It was burnt up in that fire, so you cannot accuse me of embezzlement.” That was his motivation.
ASHLEY:
Shortly thereafter, Mark was arrested for arson, mail fraud and tax evasion. He was pleading guilty, though Frances says he never admitted any guilt to her. When he was awaiting trial, he and Frances started exchanging letters.
FRANCES:
I was sitting at my desk one day and the phone rang, and all of a sudden I heard this recorded message. “Will you take collect call, telelink,” whatever, “from Mark Anderson?” And I said yes.
ASHLEY:
She visited him at the Sacramento County Jail a number of times.
FRANCES:
So I went to talk to him. And here I was this reporter thinking, “Oh, I’ll get him to sort of talk about why he set this fire,” because he was pleading guilty, but he never has confessed to setting the fire. Instead, he’d spin off stories about how he crossed the Sahara Desert on a camel, and he bought a woman for his wife for $8 and how he invented voicemail, and all these amazing wine feasts he attended. So, you listen to these and they’re great stories, but probably very few of them are true.
ASHLEY:
Over the course of the trial, documents were revealed including a psych evaluation, which painted a picture of Mark as a narcissist.
FRANCES:
He had a perception of himself as being front and central in the world. He had no empathy for other people. That explains why Mark can claim to be one of the world’s biggest wine lovers and feel absolutely no guilt or compunction about selling his client’s wine or setting fire and destroying four and a half million bottles of wine.
ASHLEY:
In 2007, he was sentenced to spend 27 years in prison in order to pay $70.3 million in restitution. This is a far longer sentence than if he went to prison just for embezzlement. When all of this was revealed, there was a sense of broken trust in the community.
FRANCES:
People in the community felt betrayed and just really surprised that this supposedly upstanding citizen had really been a crook.
ASHLEY:
Those motive and intention was only to destroy what remained of his client’s wines, which he was storing at Wine Central Warehouse. He ultimately destroyed so much more. The fire had ripple effects throughout the California wine industry.
FRANCES:
People woke up to the fact that you needed sprinklers, not just strong walls. So I think wine warehouses now are fully sprinkled. It also sort of started a process where more winemakers in Napa started to want to store their wine on site, and so a lot of winemakers have dug caves into the hills of their wineries. That’s an old thing that has started in Napa in the 1860s, but it has accelerated over the years. I think that that reflects that winemakers really prefer to be in charge of their wine from planting to grapes, to harvest, to making the wine, bottling it, and storing it. If they have control of the complete process, they can then attest to the integrity of their wine. And so having this wine warehouse burn up was an example of not having control over the integrity of your wine.
ASHLEY:
Back up on Howell Mountain, Delia and ALAN, the mother and son behind Viader Vineyards had to reckon with this loss. Viader Vineyards entire 2003 vintage was accidentally destroyed when Mark Anderson set his clients’ wine on fire at the wine’s central warehouse. Delia and Alan said their insurance wouldn’t cover the losses due to a clause that considered the wine to be in transit. The wine was in route to restaurants and wine stores, but they had to pay back their clients when the product went up in smoke. This loss caused Viader Vineyards to completely reinvent their strategy as a business. They sold wine futures as an investment in the vintages they had yet to produce. They also started a tasting room in 2006 in Delia’s Guest House; again, when it was not yet the norm to do so.
DELIA:
I needed to hit it in all four cylinders in order to generate cash flow.
ASHLEY:
Right, of course.
DELIA:
So it was necessity. It wasn’t yet the trend that it will become later.
ASHLEY:
Yeah. You were maybe ahead of the curve then. Do you still have the tasting room now?
DELIA:
Yes, I still have the tasting room, and we still have very few visitors and very exclusive. The people that support us are part of a very small group, and I still have people that collect our wine from our very first vintage that have become great friends.
ASHLEY:
That’s very cool.
DELIA:
Yeah, I find it super cool.
ASHLEY:
It was something unique that can’t necessarily be replicated. Each batch is unique and each bottle is different, and so it’s art that’s taken from the world and from whoever it belonged to, the person who made it, the person who bought it. And the toll is always so much bigger than we just lost money, basically.
DELIA:
The toll was much bigger. We didn’t just lose money; we lost probably this 20 years prior of work done to get all the placements in every top state restaurant in all 50 states and 30 countries at that time that we had to kind of let go. We had to pick and choose who we could supply with a very little that we had left and who would hang on to receive 2004 and say, “Sorry, we can’t do this.” So it took a bigger toll in that sense. It’s a lot of work thrown away.
ASHLEY:
Of course.
ALAN:
We’ve pivoted and we’re direct to consumer, and now we’re making those same types of investments and relationships with our direct consumer, the people that actually have it at the dinner table that come to visit us. Call us for Christmas, call us for their anniversary. It’s nice to see where we’ve gone as a result of this. I would not have picked this path, but it’s nice to see where we are now.
DELIA:
It makes it interesting for the consumer, the collector, and for us, too, because we get to see how the wine evolves. Wine is a beverage of camaraderie, and I think it invites a sense of celebration, but also a sense of history and a sense of wonder.
ASHLEY:
In 2020, California saw the largest wildfire season ever, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. In Napa and Sonoma, the glass fire was active for 23 days and destroyed nearly 2000 buildings and 31 wineries. The wildfire affected the property of Viader Vineyards too. The following year, Alan became a volunteer firefighter.
ALAN:
So I’m giving back to this community that that I grew up on. It took a pretty big beating for the glass from the glass fire, so that’s the least I could do. We’re not ones to just sit and kind of be the victim. Find the solution, find a way to make it better. That’s what we do. We persevere.
ASHLEY:
Viader Vineyards has rebuilt itself from the ashes while Mark Anderson sat in prison. But in October, authorities granted him what’s called a compassionate release because he was in poor health. He walked out of prison at 73 years old.
I am curious now that the man who is responsible, Mark Anderson, he was released due to health reasons From his sentence, do you think that justice was served in this case at all?
DELIA:
I think there is some kind of justice that it’s not for us to dispense. I think he will get what he deserves at one point or another. I don’t think that jail was going to fix anything.
ALAN:
That’s not going to bring back the wines, right?
DELIA:
No. It doesn’t make me feel good or bad that he was put in jail or that he was released, but I think it’s the system we have.
ASHLEY:
Right.
DELIA:
He will get what he deserves in the end.
ASHLEY:
As we prepared to publish this episode of Vinfamous, we heard the news that Mark Anderson had died earlier this year. Reporter Frances Dinkelspiel broke the story after Mark’s longtime girlfriend notified the court of his passing. He continued to deny he had set the fire up until his death — eighteen years after the disaster.
That’s all for this week’s episode of Vinfamous, a podcast by wine enthusiasts. Join us next time as we investigate a vino vendetta that sent shockwaves around the wine world.
Find Vinfamous on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen and follow the show so you never miss a scandal. Vinfamous is produced by Wine Enthusiast, in partnership with Pod People. Special thanks to our production team, Dara Kapoor, Samantha Sette and the team at Pod People: Anne Feuss, Matt Sav, Aimee Machado, Ashton Carter, Danielle Roth, Shaneez Tyndall, and Carter Wogahn.
(Theme Music Fades Out)
Last Updated: June 6, 2023
