Play Book Tag discussion
August, 2016: Entertainment
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Tangled Vines: Greed, Murder, Obsession, and an Arsonist in the Vineyards of California - Frances Dinkelspiel - 1.5 stars
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Sounds like she was thinking of the U.S.S. Indianapolis....and that is a pretty glaring error!

Tangled Vines: Greed, Murder, Obsession, and an Arsonist in the Vineyards of California
This starts out with an arson at a wine cellar warehouse. It switches to Rancho Cucamonga with a history of the first California wineries and a trail of murders. And then it switches back and forth through most of the book with another episode of a famous wine criminal in the middle somewhere. The stories were all interesting but it was a little too much switching for me. There is a lot of the biology and history of wine making which I skimmed over. I thought, Wow, this author has really done her research well, ... UNTIL she writes about the USS Arizona being torpedoed by the Japanese in the central Pacific and many of the people diving overboard eaten by sharks. WHAT! Ahh, the USS Arizona was docked in Pearl Harbor and was bombed when the Japanese attacked on Dec. 7, 1941. That got me researching on the internet and I found other discrepancies noted by others such as a winery choosing a location for its proximity to 2 freeways that in actuality weren't in existence yet.
The crimes and histories were interesting to read about, especially to me since I live a town over from the incidents but I don't know that I can recommend it to anyone looking for a factual history of winemaking since I don't know how much of it is accurate.