With wineries taking multi-million dollar hits on their inventory and momentum in the marketplace, last week's warehouse fire in Vallejo may be a boon to members of the legal profession in much the same way a Calistoga winery fire was a few years ago.

The Central Wines Vallejo warehouse fire may strike some legal parallels to the 2000 Frank-Rombauer Cellars fire on Larkmead Lane near Calistoga. About 20 mostly small winemakers lost about 84,000 cases in the three-day Calistoga fire, and more than three years of litigation produced a result that was for the most part settled out of court.

In the case of the Oct. 12 Vallejo fire, about 90 wineries leased space and officials have estimated as much as $100 million in property will have been destroyed.

"The parallels are striking," said Scott Snowden, a former Napa Superior Court judge who presided over the case. "I suspect the litigation will be different, of course, but the similarities will be striking."

Snowden, who recently retired from public life to become a private judge for the arbitration firm JAMS, said in 2003 the Rombauer case was "one of the most complex, high stakes cases ever seen in Napa County."

According to court records, some plaintiffs in the Rombauer case were at the same time defendants -- and vice versa -- and the actions of one salvage company trying to pawn off wine from the fire prompted a separate lawsuit in San Francisco. In 2001, a San Francisco judge forced Greer & Kirby, a salvage company, to stop selling wine culled from the ruins of the Rombauer fire. At the time it sold about 9,000 bottles to a North Beach import company as fresh-bottled wine.

A Napa jury in 2003 found a company called Miners & Pisani negligent for not warning Frank-Rombauer Cellars about potential hazards when it sold the winery a water heater. The financial settlement was negotiated out of court.

The first stage of the cases stemming from the Vallejo fire may involve insurance clients wrangling with their insurers about their coverage. Although investigators have determined the Vallejo fire was caused by arson, Central Wines may find itself sued over its warehouse policies, even if the arsonist is never caught. Given the multitude of wineries and clients storing wine, pasta and sugar at the Central Wines warehouse, Snowden said there could be a slew of individual claims.

"Certainly the substance of it would be different," he said. "In the Rombauer case there was some kind of problem with the water heater ... We don't even know how the fire started. The possibility of other litigation in the wake of it could begin. For instance, I could see someone suing because there wasn't enough security against arson."

There may also be some familiar faces involved.

Gerard Harney, a San Diego-based attorney who represented defendants in the Rombauer case, said he is being retained by Chubb Insurance, the company that insures several of the vintners who had property in the Vallejo fire.

Harney said he couldn't comment on potential civil lawsuits, but it was clear to him that the causes of the two fires are distinct.

"The only similarity I can make of it is that a lot of expensive wine was stored in both places," he said.

If there is a bevy of civil lawsuits, Harney reasoned they won't be filed soon.

"It takes a while," he said. "In the Rombauer case we looked at that and did a lot of investigation until we figured out what happened. It took months. It can take a while for the right investigation to be done until you get the facts."