Features

Flood of wine from overturned truck lost for good on highway

By Paul Glader The Associated Press
Wednesday March 13, 2002

SAN FRANCISCO — The wine flowed freely but no one tasted a drop when a tanker truck tipped over on Highway 16 east of Petaluma on Tuesday morning. 

About 3,200 gallons of white wine flooded from a broken steel tank after the semitrailer’s driver lost control going around a slight curve and capsized about 7 a.m. 

“I think it was chardonnay,” said Shannon King, a spokeswoman with the California Highway Patrol. 

Traffic was slowed for more than an hour on the two-lane highway about 30 miles north of San Francisco. The driver was not injured. 

“He was just happy no one else was hurt,” said CHP officer Curt Lubiszewski. 

Lubiszewski said the semi-trailer, owned by Cherokee Freight Lines in Stockton, slid 600 feet after tipping on its side. One of the steel tanks broke open, bathing the highway in a river of white wine and forming small, pinkish pools in the neighboring pasture. 

“It just smelled like fermented wine,” Lubiszewski said, noting the strong aroma was earthy — rather than bold or fruity. 

Nearly 20 firefighters, highway patrolmen and Caltrans workers were on scene to tow the truck away. As for the wine, there was no salvaging to be done, although emergency workers joked that cows in the pasture might get drunk if they decided to conduct a tasting. 

Lubiszewski said the chardonnay could have been toxic to drinking water, but since it didn’t run into a stream or groundwater, posed no risk. 

Gladys Horiuchi, communications manager for the Wine Institute in San Francisco, said 3,200 gallons equates to about 16,000 bottles of wine. At a meager $10 a bottle, that could mean a loss of $160,000. 

Cherokee Freight Lines executives could not be reached for comment. 

“What a shame,” Horiuchi said. “I haven’t heard of wine getting dumped since Prohibition.”