Oeno-File

Infamous Wine Warehouse Arsonist Gets Stiff Sentence

Anderson, the dastardly, 'portly bon vivant,' in his more ruddy years.
Anderson, the dastardly, ‘portly bon vivant,’ in his more ruddy years. Photo: Sausalito Police Department

Last year we recounted the tale of Mark Christian Anderson, the man described as a “portly bon vivant” who cavorted about Sausalito in years past and befriended many wine-industry folk before betraying everyone and lighting a warehouse on fire containing tens of millions of dollars of stored vintages in order to cover up his own embezzling. Well, yesterday, as the Chron reports, his five-year legal clusterfuck came to an end with a judge giving him the rather harsh sentence of 27 years in prison. The 63-year-old Anderson is in sad shape these days, having spent five years in prison already and most of yesterday’s court proceedings lying “on his left side on a court bench.”

Though it seems clear that Anderson has only succeeded in delaying his sentencing all this time out of an unstoppable will to talk himself out of stuff, his defense attorney says he’ll appeal the sentence. Also, he says he’ll appeal the judge’s decision to hold Anderson to a guilty plea which he tried to set aside last year, claiming his previous lawyer had thrown him “under the bus.” The attorney said yesterday that he believes the sentence is too harsh, and that Anderson will be “long dead” before he serves even twenty years.

To recap, Anderson is accused of setting fire to Wines Central, a huge, temperature-controlled wine storage facility housed in an old submarine hangar in Vallejo, out of anger and revenge as his con job was falling apart. This was in October 2005, and Anderson had been renting space in the warehouse to store his own clients’ wine, having started a boutique wine-storage firm himself. Anderson was allegedly funding his own lavish lifestyle by selling off his clients’ rare vintages out the back door, and as authorities were closing in on him, he torched the place and cooked over 4.5 million bottles of wine, some of which were the entire back catalog of vintages from small Napa wineries.

This was, for some, like the conclusion of a gruesome local murder trial. The whole Bay Area wine world gasped in horror for years about Anderson’s crime, as if he had killed a lot of peoples’ children. “We lost our history,” said winemaker Ted Hall during the sentencing hearing, crying over the vintages lost from his Long Meadow Ranch Winery in St. Helena.

The drama may be over, but clearly the pain among wine folk remains. Luckily, wine helps with that.

Vallejo wine fire gets arsonist 27 years in prison [Chron]
Earlier: Behold the Tale of an Alleged Wine Industry Con Job, and Six Million Bottles That Went Up In Flames

Infamous Wine Warehouse Arsonist Gets Stiff Sentence