(NewsWeek) - Mare Island would make a fine set for a zombie flick. A military base in Vallejo, California, that predates the Civil War, it once housed the components for Little Boy, the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. When the Navy decamped in 1996, it left behind a vast array of buildings, a ghost city of hollowed-out concrete. Some of the buildings have been reclaimed by businesses that need square footage more than foot traffic—an earthquake protection firm, a brewery—and though there are people working on the island, you never really see them, which only heightens the unease that pervades the place.

In 2002, a new tenant arrived in Building 627, the sand-colored warehouse that once housed the nuclear payload. Wines Central hoped to take advantage of Vallejo’s location, near the base of grape-rich Napa Valley but also close to San Francisco and Sacramento.

As Frances Dinkelspiel writes in her new book, Tangled Vines, one of the patrons of Wines Central was to be a corpulent bon vivant named Mark C. Anderson, who stored some 5,600 cases of wine in Building 627. Anderson was the proprietor of Sausalito Cellars, in the tony seaside village at the foot of the Golden Gate Bridge, where he lived in a houseboat. He wrote for a local paper and generally gave the sense that he was one of the many “estate babies” living the easy life in Marin County. But after a while, Anderson could no longer pay the Sausalito commercial rents; Mare Island would be cheaper. So in 2004 he moved the cases to Wines Central, without telling the wealthy collectors, restaurateurs and vintners who were his clients.

There was another thing his clients didn’t know: Anderson had been stealing from them for years. There are several varieties of wine crime, but the one in which Anderson engaged was about as brazen as yanking a glass of pinot out of an eager drinker’s hand: He simply pulled expensive bottles from their collections and sold them, betting that people with vast stores of expensive wine would not notice if just a bit of their expensive wine disappeared.

Anderson started selling wine from Sausalito Cellars to Golden West Wines of San Francisco in 2001, Dinkelspiel writes, offloading eight bottles of Château Ducru Beaucaillou at $105 a bottle and, a little later, a $400 bottle of 1982 Château Cheval-Blanc. Anderson kept selling and Golden West kept buying, happy to add prestigious bottles to its arsenal. Golden West bought $279,418 of wines from him; Premier Cru, in the East Bay town of Emeryville, bought $296,235 worth of pilfered wine.

In late 2003, a Sausalito Cellars client decided he wanted his wine back. Samuel Maslak had been paying Anderson $600 a month to store 756 cases of wine from a restaurant of his that had failed. Hoping to auction his wines at Christie’s, he sent a mover to retrieve the wine from Sausalito Cellars. The mover informed Maslak there were only 144 cases of wine, leading to questions about what happened to the other 612, questions that Anderson answered with implausible excuses. Another collector, Ron Lussier, had entrusted Anderson with valuable bottles from Stags’ Leap, the legendary Napa vineyard whose cabernet triumphed in the 1976 “Judgment of Paris,” the oenological version of a feel-good, I-can’t-believe-it Rocky Balboa victory. Inside one of the cases he’d entrusted to Anderson were bottles of Trader Joe’s “Two-Buck Chuck.” The missing bottles of Stags’ Leap had been valued at $650 each.

Law enforcement was closing in too. A district attorney in Marin County filed embezzlement charges in February 2004, then added more charges in December. The following April, both local police and the Internal Revenue Service raided Anderson’s home. Inside they found books like The Modern Identity Changer and Hide Your Assets  and Disappear: A Step-by-Step Guide to Vanishing Without a Trace. In June 2005, Wines Central told Anderson to take his wine elsewhere.

On October 12, Anderson arrived at Wines Central, presumably to clear out his storage space. With him he carried a blowtorch and rags soaked in gasoline. Inside his storage space, he used a blowtorch to light rags soaked in gasoline, then ran. The fire burned for eight hours, destroying about $250 million worth of wine. Anderson did not just obliterate the collections of his own clients; his spite, and the fire that spite ignited, destroyed the wines of people who had nothing to do with him but were simply his “neighbors” in Wines Central. The fire was intended to mask the evidence of his theft, but it was also a cruel strike against all those who had the sophistication, and the wealth, that Anderson had long envied. Dinkelspiel avoids psychoanalysis in Tangled Vines, which is probably wise. But it’s not hard to see Anderson’s motive as the rage of a poseur who knew he would soon be unmasked.

Inside the warehouse, pallets collapsed onto each other, shattering bottles. Some of the wine that was left intact was “cooked” by the heat. “It’s remarkable,” Dinkelspiel writes, “how little it takes to ruin 4.5 million bottles of wine.”

Don’t Forget to Spit

After my visit to Building 627, I drove north into Napa. Even the name is seductive, an enigmatic parcel of trochaic beauty. When a cork factory appears on the side of Route 29, you know that you’re close, and when you reach Yountville, you’re in the heart of it. Named after Napa’s first white settler, Yountville has a downtown that looks like an ersatz Mediterranean village. A sure sign of the town’s wealth is that in the middle of the afternoon, middle-aged men ride through town on expensive bikes, heading toward scorched hills yearning for rain. Tourists amble from tasting room to tasting room, reminding themselves to swirl and smell. Or they head out on the Silverado Trail, whose undulations goad you into an irresistible comparison with Tuscany.

The Napa Valley is, in many ways, the obverse of the Santa Clara Valley, south of San Francisco. Until the 1960s, Napa was “an agricultural backwater given over to prune and walnut trees, pastures and some vines,” James Conaway writes in his history of the region. Santa Clara was a sleepy collection of orchards too, but then an ambitious new breed of craftsmen settled the South Bay towns of Palo Alto and Menlo Park. Instead of bottling zinfandels, these renegades etched semiconductors. Today, some of the vast wealth of Silicon Valley, as Santa Clara is now universally known, flows north, over the Golden Gate Bridge, into the vineyards of Napa and Sonoma. Worth magazine recently noted that “many of the best wines” in California “were built with handsome profits from Silicon Valley ventures.” One vineyard profiled by Worth was founded by the head of Cypress Semiconductor, who called his newest enterprise Clos de la Tech.