Introducing Blood Vines

I have a new podcast series out today.

A question I’m sometimes asked, especially by young journalists, is where I find stories. I wish I could give an easy answer, that there was a story fairy who visited me in my sleep, or that I knew of some “Black List” like Hollywood has for unproduced screenplays.

The reality is that story ideas come from almost anywhere—conversations, firsthand experiences, random internet scrolling, a line from a book—and the vast majority of them are not suitable for longform projects. Most ideas don’t pan out. That might be because I find the story has already been done by another reporter, that the story is different (and not in a compelling way) from what I thought it would be, or because I don’t have access to the documents or sources I’d need to piece things together.

But every once in a while, the kernel of an idea survives the initial stress test and begins to gain momentum. So it was with an investigation that eventually snowballed into my latest longform project “Blood Vines,” an 8-episode podcast series about one of the largest wine frauds in U.S. history and the mysterious murder of a witness.

The full series is out today and can be binged, ad-free, with a subscription to Wondery+. Blood Vines will also have a wider, free release on May 6.

Here’s the first episode:

So how did this idea come about?

(Warning: Spoiler below)

Back in 2017, I was at a holiday gathering in California when one of the guests mentioned that he was retiring after almost 50 years in the wine business. “That’s a long career,” I said. “What were some of the most memorable things that happened?”

The retiree ticked off a few recollections, but caught my full attention when he mentioned the murder of a well-known grape broker in Stockton in the early 1990’s. The victim’s name was Jack Licciardi, and he’d been responsible for moving thousands of tons of grapes between farmers and wineries over decades. His execution-style death apparently sent shockwaves throughout California’s wine industry—particularly because one of his sons was already under investigation for fraud, accused of mislabeling grapes and swindling millions of dollars from well-known wineries.

I’d never heard of any of this; the only wine scams I knew about were covered in “The Billionaire’s Vinegar” and “Sour Grapes”—the latter of which explores Rudy Kurniawan, a conman who duped high-end collectors with counterfeit bottles.

So I scribbled some details from this dinner party guest into my phone’s note app. And later, when I revisited those notes, I did find some reporting that verified the main plot points I’d heard at the party.

But there wasn’t very much reporting; the events in question all happened before the Internet went mainstream, so there was very little digital documentation of the crimes. Most of what had migrated online were short newspaper stories, and the dispatches were scattershot and piecemeal—spread out over a 9-year-period when the grape fraud, fraud investigation, murder, and then murder investigation collectively took place.

In other words, it seemed no one had ever stitched together the whole story before, let alone explored how deep the connections went.

Gradually, other discoveries gave my inquiry traction: sources who agreed to share secrets with me for the first time, a paper lunch bag full of audio cassette tapes, jailhouse letters, and an entire trove of discovery material that a defendant had lugged around for 30 years.

In 2021, I teamed up with Foxtopus Ink producers

Scott Carney

and Laura Krantz—who also produced my earlier audio series The Syndicate—to see how deep the rabbit hole went.

It turned out the person who’d originally clued me onto the story didn’t know the half of it. Not only did these events in the 1980’s and 90’s totally change California’s wine industry—effects that reverberate in wine production today—but there was a major development during my reporting in 2023 that stunned even those closest to the story, all of whom thought the murder investigation had been settled for decades.

I hope you’ll check out my years of reporting on Blood Vines. And please do let me know what you think of the series. Cheers.