Wine Scandal in Sausalito

Posted on June 4th, 2007 in Drink, Current Events by Craig

Wow, is all I can say, about this story of a con-man who used his pillar-of-the-community reputation to swindle some expensive wine collections from Bay Area yokels.

Samuel Maslak told investigators he had been the chief investor in Bacchanal, a South San Francisco restaurant that went broke in 2000. Needing to store 756 cases of leftover wine — collateral in a bankruptcy proceeding — he found Mark Anderson.

The wine was trucked to a waterfront warehouse used by Sausalito Cellars in May 2001, where Maslak assumed it would be safe until he arranged to sell it through Christie’s. But when the auction house came to pick up the wine in December 2003, Fraass said, Anderson released just 166 cases. Only the cheapest wines remained.

“I called Mark and said, ‘There should be roughly 7,000 bottles of wine,’ ” Maslak said. “Mark’s answer was, ‘I was wondering when you were going to deliver (the rest of) those wines for storage.’ “

Via David at Cronaca.

Manzanilla

Posted on May 1st, 2007 in Drink, Food, Spain by Craig

One of my worn, old stories involves the practical jokes of a bartender who made fun of three amigos ordering manzanilla in Jerez, Spain, sending each of them back to the table with cups of hot tea, too proud to admit that they didn’t speak Spanish well enough to buy a drink.

Here’s a post at Tapas Talk that makes me want to go back and order some tapas and fino the right way.