Wine warehouse fire
A 240,000 square foot warehouse with $100 million worth of wine burned last week in Vallejo, California, just south of Napa. The original story from SFgate is here (includes photos) with a follow up today here.
Many wineries stored selected older vintages of wines at the facility. Justin of Paso Robles lost 15,000 cases and Saintsbury lost their entire “library” of wines.
Arson is sadly a thought to be a leading cause. Police are investigating anyone with access to the facility. Mark Anderson, the owner of a Sausalito wine-storage firm who faces embezzlement charges in Marin County for allegedly stealing $1 million of wine from private collections last month is among those who had access to the facility before it burned according to the police.
To put the scale of this size loss of collectible wine, I’d venture to say that $100 million is more than all the wine that US auction houses sell every year. In fact, it could be more than the value of two years. It will be interesting to see what happens to the price of affected wines at auction. Who knows, maybe some collectors will even give part of their collections back to Sean Thackrey and Richard Ward as thanks for making great wines?
