Rosé All Day, Plus Murder

Summary

Podcast Summary: Infamous – Episode: "Rosé All Day, Plus Murder"

Podcast Information:

• Title: Infamous
• Host/Author: Campside Media / Sony Music Entertainment
• Release Date: June 26, 2025
• Description: Infamous delves into explosive scandals, exploring the behind-the-scenes efforts of journalists to hold power accountable. In this episode, the hosts investigate a scandal in the wine industry that intertwines fraud and murder.

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Introduction

In the episode titled "Rosé All Day, Plus Murder," the hosts Vanessa Grigoriadis, Gabriel Sherman, and Natalie Robehmed explore the intriguing and dark history behind White Zinfandel—a seemingly innocent, sweet wine that played a pivotal role in one of the most significant scandals in the American wine industry. Through an in-depth conversation with Chris Walker, the producer of the podcast Blood Vines, the episode unravels a tale of fraud, high-stakes deception, and murder.

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The Rise of White Zinfandel

White Zinfandel emerged in the mid-1970s as a revolutionary product that transformed the American wine landscape. Initially a happy accident, it became a flagship product that popularized wine drinking in the United States, shifting consumer preferences from beer and sweet cocktails to wine.

• Chris Walker explains:
  "White Zinfandel is the wine at the heart of the story I investigated because it inadvertently set the conditions for fraud and has a remarkable story in itself" (13:05)

Key Points:

• Origin: Sutter Home, a struggling family winery, accidentally created White Zinfandel in 1975 when a fermentation batch got stuck, resulting in a sweet, low-alcohol wine.
• Impact: This unexpected success led to millions of cases being produced, positioning Sutter Home as a commercial powerhouse and captivating American consumers with its sweet profile reminiscent of "wine meets Jolly Ranchers."
• Market Influence: By the mid-1980s, White Zinfandel accounted for nearly 10% of the American wine market, sparking a subculture around pink wines.

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The Fraud: Grape Mislabeling Scandal

The soaring demand for White Zinfandel led to supply shortages, dramatically increasing the price of Zinfandel grapes by over 500%. To meet production demands without escalating costs, producers resorted to grape mislabeling—a practice that would ignite a major fraud investigation.

• Chris Walker details:
  "White Zinfandel is created with Zinfandel grapes, and there's only a limited quantity of Zinfandel vineyards in California... the price of Zinfandel grapes spiked more than 500% in a very short period of time" (16:06)

Key Points:

• Supply Crunch: Sutter Home's early dominance in securing Zinfandel grape contracts left other wineries scrambling, creating an industry-wide fight for scarce resources.
• Fraudulent Practices: To maintain affordable prices, some wineries began substituting high-priced Zinfandel grapes with cheaper varieties like Grenache or Barbera.
• Regulatory Oversight: California's Department of Food and Agriculture and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) received tips about the grape switching, sparking a federal investigation.

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The Murder: Jack Licciardi's Death

The fraud investigation took a sinister turn with the murder of Jack Licciardi, a prominent grape broker, just before the case was set to go to trial. This murder raised suspicions about who might want to silence him and highlighted the dangerous intersections of business fraud and criminal activity.

• Chris Walker recounts:
  "The patriarch of the Licciardi family, Jack, was murdered in his living room, certainly raising the question of who might not want his testimony heard." (20:37)

Key Points:

• The Licciardi Family: Jack Licciardi, an influential grape broker with deep connections in the California wine industry, was central to the grape distribution network.
• Suspicious Circumstances: Jack's son, Michael Licciardi, was implicated in the fraud without Jack's knowledge, suggesting internal family conflict and potential motives for murder.
• Investigation Challenges: The intertwined relationships and fear among conspirators created a tense environment where multiple suspects emerged, complicating the investigation.

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The Investigation: A Four-Year Odyssey

The federal investigation into the grape fraud and subsequent murder was extensive, spanning four years and uncovering layers of deceit within the wine industry.

• Chris Walker explains:
  "The investigation actually takes four years, so a really long time... there is a total of $55 million worth of mislabeled wine sold over this period." (22:22)

Key Points:

• Discovery and Evidence: Michael Licciardi represented himself during the murder trial, rejecting legal counsel, which ultimately led to a conviction. His decision, though ill-advised, resulted in him preserving critical discovery material—over a thousand pages of police reports, interviews, and transcripts.
• Unveiling the Network: The investigation revealed multiple rings involved in the fraud, particularly in California's Central Valley, which supplied the bulk of mislabeled grapes to major wineries like Mondavi and Delicato.
• Lack of Consumer Awareness: Remarkably, consumers remained oblivious to the fraud, as the mislabeled wines maintained expected taste profiles, indicating the subtlety of the deception.

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Insights and Conclusions

The "Rosé All Day, Plus Murder" episode of Infamous offers a compelling narrative that intertwines the rise of a popular wine with the dark underbelly of industry fraud and murder. The story raises thought-provoking questions about authenticity, consumer awareness, and the ethical boundaries within the wine industry.

• Philosophical Reflection:
  "If you drink a mislabeled bottle of wine and you don't realize it, does it really matter that it wasn't what you thought it was?" (30:55)
  This quote encapsulates the episode's exploration of whether deceit affects the consumer experience if the end product remains enjoyable.

• Industry Implications:
  The scandal threatened California's reputation as a premier wine-producing region, highlighting the fragile balance between commercial success and ethical practices.

• Personal Enjoyment vs. Authenticity:
  The discussion emphasizes the subjective nature of wine tasting and the social aspects of wine consumption, questioning the necessity of strict authenticity if the product fulfills its role as a social lubricant.

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Notable Quotes

• Chris Walker on White Zinfandel's accidental creation:
  "If you drink a mislabeled bottle of wine and you don't realize it, does it really matter that it wasn't what you thought it was?" (30:55)

• On the speed of the grape price spike:
  "The price of Zinfandel grapes spiked more than 500% in a very short period of time." (16:06)

• Discussing the industry's reaction to fraud:
  "It's almost like a philosophical cone. You know, if you drink a mislabeled bottle of wine and you don't realize it, does it really matter that it wasn't what you thought it was?" (30:55)

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Conclusion

"Rosé All Day, Plus Murder" masterfully intertwines the cultural phenomenon of White Zinfandel with a gripping true-crime narrative. The episode not only sheds light on a significant scandal within the wine industry but also invites listeners to reflect on broader themes of authenticity, consumer responsibility, and the unforeseen consequences of commercial success. Through Chris Walker's detailed investigation and engaging storytelling, Infamous delivers a memorable exploration of how a sweet wine can lead to a bitter tale of fraud and murder.

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For those intrigued by the intricate dance between cultural trends and criminal activity, this episode is a must-listen. Explore more about the Blood Vines podcast and dive deeper into the fascinating story by tuning in wherever you get your podcasts.

Transcript

[Vanessa]

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[Vanessa]

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[Lily Houston Smith]

Campside Media from Sony Music Entertainment and Campside Media. This is infamous producer Lily Houston Smith here and this week it's hot all over and we are talking wine, the nectar of the gods. The drink you might need at the end of a long summer day. Wine o' clock that I actually wrote my college thesis about wine. It was for the classics department and it was about comic portrayals of wine drinking in classical Athens. Yes, I went to liberal arts college. Basically what I was looking at was how the way the Greeks drank their wine became a shorthand for a person's moral character. Good people drank their wine watered down in appropriate settings like the symposium, but bad people, they drank their wine neat or unmixed, and they drank it in excess. Or worse, they drank beer. And these differences were sometimes the butt of a joke. It's not really that different today. Like people might mention that someone drinks a lot of Franzia as a sort of wink wink way of implying they might be a little chaotic and maybe have no taste. Franzia, by the way, it's that cheap boxed wine they sell everywhere and I definitely drank a lot of it in college while I was writing this thesis. Anyway, this week we'll be talking about one particular wine I another maligned wine like Franzia and the scandal behind it. It's called White Zinfandel and if you haven't heard of it, it's a type of it's a light bodied, sweet winelike really sweet with notes of bubblegum and cotton candy. And it has a surprisingly bloody history. The invention of this wine ultimately led to a huge fraud involving millions of bottles of wine, a federal investigation, and a cold blooded murder. This is all covered in blood. Vines, a podcast from Chris Walker and Scott Carney. The infamous team listened to the podcast and truly could not get enough of it. It's twisty true crime, but also just a fascinating cultural history of our favorite summery wines. So let's listen in as Vanessa and Chris talk about the story that unraveled in his investigation. And also just about wine in general, because wine is so subjective and so personal. Like, no one wants to be embarrassed with bad wine in front of their guests, but we just want to drink what tastes good. If you, like me, have ever enjoyed a wine that some snooty sommelier might turn their nose up at, then this conversation is for you. But before we play that interview, here's just a little taste of the podcast. Blood Vines.

[Chris Walker]

Let's start at the beginning. White Zinfandel. Never heard of White Zin. You must be under 40. Not too long ago, you couldn't watch a sitcom like Frasier without a moment like this. Coming up. Does she ever act delusional?

[Lily Houston Smith]

Well, she often claims that she's responsible for the success of our show.

[Chris Walker]

Building, building. Does she display below average intelligence?

[Lily Houston Smith]

She once ordered a bottle of White Zinfandel.

[Vanessa]

Jackpot.

[Chris Walker]

Never mind the joke, it's not very good. Point is, White Zin used to be everywhere. And even if it's not ringing a bell, you've surely heard of its siblings.

[Lily Houston Smith]

It's more than a drink. So this is the life. It's a lifestyle.

[Chris Walker]

It's good times.

[Lily Houston Smith]

Being with friends, not having a care in the world. Once considered the red headed stepchild of wines is having its moment in the sun.

[Chris Walker]

For the past 15 years, America has been in the middle of a fervor. These pink wines now account for nearly 10% of the American wine market, and they've even developed their own subculture. First pour, shoots out.

[Vanessa]

Woo.

[Chris Walker]

Oh, man.

[Vanessa]

Yay. Cheers, y' all. Chris, thank you so much for coming on Infamous.

[Chris Walker]

Thanks for having me.

[Vanessa]

Awesome to learn all about your incredible podcast, which I really totally enjoyed. It's such a joy to listen to something that is true crime but also has larger cultural import. But in any case, tell me about you and your connection to wine. Were you always a wine drinker? How did you grow up? What was that all about before you delved into this for years of your life?

[Chris Walker]

I would not consider myself a wine expert, but I grew up in a household that really treasured wines. My dad is in a wine drinking group called the Cork Dorks, which is just as cringy as it sounds. And so they do blind wine tastings sometimes with nice bottles and try to guess just by taste, the vintage, the varietal, the region. I was never that great at that, but personally, I really got into wine when I studied abroad in Argentina, which is very well known for its Malbecs. And I spent some time in Mendoza, which is the main region where most Malbec comes from.

[Vanessa]

So where is Mendoza exactly? And what part of the country is it? And is it just a region that's like beat by sun all day and Malbec I guess is the kind of like dark purple grape.

[Chris Walker]

Yes. Malbec is a type of grape that grows particularly well in this region of Argentina. Mendoza is nestled up against the Andes, sort of parallel with where Santiago is in Chile. On the other side of the Andes. It's dry. You know, that also affects the types of grapes that can grow in a region in fairly high altitude. But if you ever have a chance to go down and do some wine tastings in Mendoza, I highly recommend it. Shout out to Mr. Hugo's Bike Tours, who will set you up with a map of vineyards. And I don't know if they still do this, but when I went, you know, no liability form or anything, but he filled, he filled everyone's bike water bottles with cheap jug wine and then sent you on your way to go wine tasting at these various vineyards.

[Vanessa]

Nice. That's the kind of thing you can do at 21. It's a little harder later on, but. How did you hear about this story in this case?

[Chris Walker]

I was at a holiday gathering in California, this was a while back, maybe 2017. And there was a attendee at this holiday gathering who was retiring after 50 years in California's wine industry. And so I asked him, over five decades in your career in this industry, what are some of the, you know, more memorable things that happened or interesting things that occurred during your career? He ticked off a number of things, but certainly caught my interest when he mentioned that he, he said, not many people know this, but there was a widespread grape mislabeling and fraud in the wine industry in the 1980s. And in the midst of that, there was this well known grape broker. And I actually didn't know what a grape broker was. Grape brokers are kind of behind the scenes figures in the industry. They simply facilitate deals between vineyards, farmers who grow grapes, and wineries that produce wine. So in the midst of all this grape mislabeling, it became a big federal case, he said. And then right before the case was about to start, one of the best known grape brokers in California was murdered. That certainly caught my interest.

[Vanessa]

Yeah, that sounds like a good story, right?

[Chris Walker]

Yeah. You know, I had my smartphone and jotted down a few of the names that this party guest remembered and tucked it away into my. My list of potential stories to look into later and finally got around to it in about 2021. And, oh, my goodness, there was a lot here. I. I think you probably know this as a narrative journalist yourself. So many story ideas don't work out, but sometimes you go down a rabbit hole and there's just layer after layer after layer. And this was one of those stories.

[Vanessa]

Yeah. You never know. You never know which way it's going to go. You have to really become not that attached to the results, I think, is the way I've started to think about it, because you just got to start looking into the thing. So tell me what you learned about this wine, White zinfandel, which I do remember having a white infantile once or twice, maybe on a patio at a nightclub when a lot of people around me were smoking Parliament cigarettes back in the early aughts or something like that. You know, it's sort of associated with late 90s, in some ways female culture, maybe like just before Sex and the City, which really popularized harder drinks, like Cosmopolitan again. It's a kind of grape. Right. We. We all know that's how. How you make the wine. But tell us how that wine got made.

[Chris Walker]

So white zinfandel is the wine at the heart of the story I investigated because it inadvertently set the conditions for fraud and has a remarkable story in itself. So American drinking culture, it's interesting because we go through these phases, and the United States didn't used to be known as a wine drinking culture, and that developed in part because of white zinfandels.

[Vanessa]

What kind of culture was it known as? Whiskey and beer, I assume beer and cocktails. Cocktails. Okay.

[Chris Walker]

And especially sweet cocktails.

[Vanessa]

So you mean the 50s and the 60s and the sort of I'll make you a highball and let's have a fruity drink after the man comes home from work is like that kind of cocktail culture.

[Chris Walker]

Absolutely, yeah. Wine at that time was largely seen as the domain of the snooty French, and we weren't. And we weren't about it. Yeah. And at the high end of more premium wines, this did start to change with the judgment of Paris. If you've ever seen the movie Bottle Shock with Alan Rickman, R.I.P. it's about how winemakers in Napa entered a blind wine tasting in Paris and beat the French in a blind wine tasting, which really put California on the map for premium wines. But. But that still wasn't, you know, mass market produced wines. But then we have white Zinfandel. So we have to go back to the year 1975 to a winery that many of us have heard of, Sutter Home.

[Vanessa]

I have heard of that, yes. I mean, I've drank some Sutter Home in my time.

[Chris Walker]

So white zinfandel is what put Sutter Home on the map at the time they were a small struggling family winery and one of their winemakers, Bob Trinceros, was making traditional zinfandel. So zinfandel is a type of red grape, and you can make a red wine using zinfandel. So he was doing that and using a process called Sagnier, which removes some of the clear juice when you're producing a concentrated red wine. And you can use that runoff juice to make rose. So, you know, he's making his red zinfandel, he's got his runoff juice and is going to make a from that. And he had a problem where the batch got stuck. And what this means is the fermentation stopped, so the sugar stopped converting into alcohol. And so he ended up with, you know, this abomination. If you're trying to make a traditional dry French style. He had this rose that was really sweet and really low in alcohol and, and he tasted it and thought, oh my gosh, this is. No one's going to want this. But, you know, rather than throw this out, let's just bottle it and see if people buy it so that this isn't a total loss. And lo and behold, people loved it.

[Vanessa]

So how did it start? It was just, I assume, being shipped to liquor stores across the country or this became like a California phenomenon at the beginning.

[Chris Walker]

It was first a Sutter Home phenomenon. So other wineries, including those run by well known families in California, the Mondavis, the Behringers, they saw what Trinchero and Sutter Home were doing with white zinfandel and they thumbed their nose at it. They said, no one's going to want this. But as the years passed, by the mid-80s, Sutter Home was producing millions of cases of white zinfandel and it was flying off shelves. It turned Sutter Home from this small, straw struggling family winery to a commercial powerhouse. As we know today, if you've ever had white Zinfandel, it is like cloyingly sweet. It almost tastes like wine meets Jolly Ranchers. But as one wine historian put it to me, Americans talk dry, but they drink sweet. And we loved this stuff. We're a nation raised on Coca Cola.

[Lily Houston Smith]

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[Chris Walker]

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[Lily Houston Smith]

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[Vanessa]

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[Lily Houston Smith]

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[Vanessa]

This production's being done by Sutter Home, but other people are getting into it. How do the grapes start getting swapped out for different kinds of grapes?

[Chris Walker]

So white Zinfandel is created with Zinfandel grapes, and there's only a limited quantity of Zinfandel vineyards in California. So Sutter Home saw that this was taking off. And as other wineries lagged into getting into the white Zinfandel game, Sutter Home very smartly bought up as many contracts to buy Zinfandel grapes as they could find around the entire state. So it's important to note that while Sutter Home was the creator of white Zinfandel, they actually avoided the fraud that would later develop because they had sewn up all these contracts. The problem was then you had what eventually became 51 wineries that joined the white Zinfandel fad. And now they had to source whatever Zinfandel was left in the state. And so as I put it in the podcast, it was an industry wide fight for scraps. And you might imagine the economic pressures of supply and demand that this created. So the price of Zinfandel grapes spiked more than 500% in a very short period of time.

[Vanessa]

Okay, so there's a race, basically there's.

[Chris Walker]

A race to secure whatever Zinfandel is left. The price spikes more than 500%. And this is a real problem because these are cheap, mass produced bottles of Sutter Home had set a price point that consumers expected to pay of $3 or $4 a bottle. And so other producers felt pressure to also release their bottles at that price point. But then how do you do that if your main ingredient is reaching stratospheric prices? So herein lies the conditions for fraud.

[Vanessa]

So how did it all go down?

[Chris Walker]

So my podcast follows two investigations, one of them beginning with the fraud. There were some tips that came into California's Department of Food and Agriculture, as well as the atf, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. And they were getting tips that, hey, we're hearing that there are various actors who are switching grapes, particularly ones that are destined for bottles of white zinfandel. So the wineries think that they're getting Zinfandel grapes, but actually they're giving them Grenache or Barbera grapes. This is the 1980s. The ATF at the time was doing gun and gang investigations. And so the lead case agent on the case actually didn't really care about it and was trying to get the case thrown out so he could get back to, I don't know, kicking ass and taking names in gang investigations. And he happened to take the case to an assistant U.S. attorney who was a major wine snob. And so he saw the case and then launched a big federal investigation.

[Vanessa]

So funny. So who was behind all these dastardly deeds?

[Chris Walker]

So there were numerous rings that were carrying out this fraud. The main one that I looked into involved a circle of growers in California's Central Valley, which actually produces far more grapes than Napa or Sonoma, but usually lower quality grapes. They were collecting grapes from various growers and selling huge quantities of them to the Mondavi Winery, to Delicado, which was one of the biggest contract producers of wine in California. And we're talking tons and tons of grapes that were producing millions of bottles over a period of maybe five years or so of mislabeled wine.

[Vanessa]

And are the people who are drinking it, do they have any idea?

[Chris Walker]

I mean, that's one of the most remarkable parts of this story, is that no consumers ever noticed anything wrong or reported it. As far as I can tell, this investigation was kicked off because of tips and rumors within the wine industry, among wine producers. But as far as I can tell, there were no consumers. And there was a total of $55 million worth of mislabeled wine sold over this period. And the bulk of it was white zinfandel sold at three or $4 a bottle. So again, millions of bottles, and no one tasted anything wrong, which I think says a Lot about the wine itself.

[Vanessa]

Yeah.

[Chris Walker]

And also just how bad most of us are at being able to discern grape types from each other.

[Vanessa]

Right. Yeah. How does this turn deadly?

[Chris Walker]

So the federal investigation zoomed in on this one grape brokerage, and they were responsible for facilitating a lot of movement of this mislabeled fruit. It was a family known as the Licciardis. And the patriarch of this family was this guy, Jack Licciardi, who was, as I mentioned earlier, one of the best connected grape brokers in California, had immigrated to the US From Sicily, established himself in the wine industry around the time of Prohibition, and dealt with all the old time wine producers in California. And the feds and the ATF figure out that one of his sons is one of the main people facilitating this grape fraud. A guy by the name of Michael Licciardi. And as they dig more into it, they find out that Michael is seemingly facilitating this fraud without his dad's knowledge. And Jack was in a position to know a lot of who might be responsible for what. So when he ended up mysteriously murdered in his living room, certainly raised the question of who might not want his testimony heard.

[Vanessa]

I see. And so who were the various suspects?

[Chris Walker]

His son was one of them. Also his son's co conspirators in the fraud. And then, as it later is revealed, there's another son. Again, this is a big Italian American family who comes under suspicion. And at the outset, it was, you know, not clear which direction investigators should go. And also very scary. You have all these various characters involved in this, and they're all looking over their shoulder as well, worried that they'll be next.

[Vanessa]

So how long does this investigation take?

[Chris Walker]

The investigation actually takes four years, so a really long time. And you'll appreciate this as a, as a reporter, it eventually does go to trial, and there eventually is a conviction secured and the defendant in that trial, against the recommendation of the judge and everyone else involved in the case, he represented himself with no lawyer in a first degree murder trial, which is a terrible idea.

[Vanessa]

Why would he do such a thing?

[Chris Walker]

He claimed that he wasn't convinced that he would be able to get things on the record exactly how he wanted it presented. He also claimed that he couldn't afford a private defense attorney, but of course he rejected a public defender. But it was a terrible idea. The case did not work out well for him. He is still in prison serving a life sentence, and very generously agreed to do many interviews with me. But one of the astonishing things that I found is because he had served as his own defense, he received all of the discovery material from the prosecution and he had held onto all of it. So since his trial, we're talking over a thousand pages of police reports and basically like a almost week by week description of the police's investigation, including interviews and transcripts and various suspects that they looked into.

[Vanessa]

Oh, my God. Where was this all? Just like in his sister's basement or something.

[Chris Walker]

He handed it off to a college friend. And so I met up with her and she had it all in binders. And this allowed me to actually chart out that four year murder investigation that I was mentioning in granular detail. And it was fascinating.

[Vanessa]

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Okay, so quick recap. In the late 80s, white zinfandel was exploding in popularity. But to meet this new demand, some producers were secretly swapping out pricey zinfandel grapes with cheaper varieties. And that led to a major federal fraud case. Then in 1991, a guy who was about to testify in that trial, one of California's most well connected grape brokers, is murdered. Which made it seem like maybe there was someone who really didn't want this guy's testimony to be heard. Who was that guy? We're not going to spoil who did it. You'll have to listen to Chris's podcast for that, Blood Vines. But here's more of his conversation with Vanessa.

[Vanessa]

So do you think they could have gotten away with. I mean, not murder. It's, you know, actually relatively easy, right? Half of murders are not solved. But do you think they could have gotten away with just swapping out the grapes?

[Chris Walker]

I mean, the big question now is how much the wineries knew. Because it begs the question of how wineries could have let so many thousands of pounds of grapes pass right beneath their noses and not realize, you know, these are supposed to be career winemakers realize that these were the wrong types of grapes. The biggest bad actor that was caught is. Was actually Fred Franzia. Not Franzia of Franzia boxed wines. He's related, but he started this company called Bronco Wine Company, which became famous because they are the ones that bought Charles Shaw and then later did a deal with Trader Joe's and created what we now know as Two Buck Chuck.

[Vanessa]

Real high end folks we're talking about here, right? Yeah.

[Chris Walker]

He actually had this tongue in cheek practice, which I guess is a tradition in Italy, which is when you. You harvest a bunch of grapes, you're supposed to give a prayer over it. But he had his own version where he would have a bunch of grapes that weren't zinfandel and he would sprinkle some zinfandel leaves on top and bless them thereby into Zinfandel.

[Vanessa]

Oh, my go. Well, I mean, you have to think, though, the temptation to bend the rules must be so incredibly high. It's sort of like when there's a run on Jackson Pollock paintings. The people who are around him are like, yeah, I'll just splatter some of this paint and say, I found these in the barn back here. I would just think stuff like this is happening more than we even know. I mean, who is watching, really, this?

[Chris Walker]

Yeah. When you sell grapes, it's not only supposed to be a certain variety, but it's even supposed to be like a certain sugar content. And there was a source who he was telling me about working at a commercial winery where to get grapes to the correct sugar content. They used to dump bags of sugar over the back of the trucks that these would come into. And there's. There's actually a device that the state regulators use called a refractometer. They stick this tube down into the grapes and, you know, extract some juice and then measure that sugar. So before the trucks were arriving into the station where the state inspectors had these refractometers, the winery was dumping bags of sugar and then dissolving that into these tubs of grapes.

[Vanessa]

I see. Very, very crafty. So you mentioned before how did become popular? Was it after white Zinfandel or had always been out there and also thought of as maybe a lesser wine, has.

[Chris Walker]

Been popular in France for a really long time, since the days of Louis xiv. But white Zinfandel, which is a type of. I would argue that that really kicked off the craze in the United States, and then white zinfandel kind of fell out of favor. But we've seen a second coming of the aughts. It's now still a hugely popular category of wine. We've all seen the all day tank tops and yeah, these sort of like pop culture brands. So it's still incredibly popular. I mean it's origin story in the US at least. I would largely credit to White Zinfandel. It was funny when we did a, we did a little release party for our podcast and we bought some bottles of White Zinfandel, including the original Sutter Home, but as well as some ones from Gallo and Barringer. We had people do taste testings of the White Zinfandel to give their tasting notes and, you know, some funny answers like this tastes like regret to me or this tastes like Barbie's tears. But it's, you know, wine is so subjective, which I think makes it really fun. It really just comes down to do you enjoy the wine and the experience? There's, there's so much of a social component to it as well. It's social lubricant and intoxicant. And this is where when it comes to fraud, it's sort of a weird thing where, yes, this was a big deal in that it was skirting all these regulations in California. It was potentially threatening the reputation of California's industry as news of this fraud got out. But the fact that individual wine drinkers didn't really notice that these were mislabeled bottles of wine, I think raises more questions about what wine drinking is really for. And in the podcast I raised this question where, you know, it's almost like a philosophical cone. You know, if you drink a mislabeled bottle of wine and you don't realize it, does it really matter that it wasn't what you thought it was?

[Vanessa]

Yeah, I mean, it's true. If it was enjoyable, if your guests enjoyed it, if it was a celebratory moment or a contemplative moment or something, what does it matter? There's always that inclination to say, well, I don't want to be ripped off, but White Zinfandel was a cheap bottle of wine anyway. Yeah, it's a fascinating podcast so everybody should check it out. It's called Blood Vines and it is available wherever you get. Your podcast has an awesome piece of art. You can see a wine glass that's being blown to smithereens, which is, I guess, not part of what happens during the murder. But use your imagination. Thank you so much, Chris Walker. Thank you for coming on and talking to us about it.

[Chris Walker]

Thank you so much for having me. It was a real pleasure.

[Lily Houston Smith]

That's it for Infamous. If you enjoy the show, please leave us a rating and review and tell your friends. If you want to follow me on Instagram, you can find me at Natrobe. That's N A T R O B E. And if you want to support Vanessa's work, you can buy her book, Blurred Rethinking Sex, Power, and Consent on Campus. See you next week.

[Chris Walker]

Dance.