History Recap / ColumboS03E02

** What drives Carsini over the edge is when his brother mocks him about how he's going to sell the vineyard to the Marino Brothers, a mass market wine company, but tells Adrian he'll be taken care of, and maybe the Marino Brothers will "allow" Carsini to "lick the labels."
-->'''Adrian:''' The Marino Brothers? The... Marino Broth... [[SuddenlyShouting THE MARINO BROTHERS?!]] The "69¢-a-gallon" Marino Brothers?! They don't make ''WINE''! They don't even make good ''mouthwash''!
** Also later, during the scene in the restaurant when he believes they've been served a glass of wine that is so oxidized from overheating he suggests it's been stored on the stove. It's a masterclass in acting from Pleasence. "An exciting meal has been RUINED by the presence of this...This...LIQUID FILTH!"
* BigEater: Rick was one which makes Columbo suspicious when the autopsy on his body shows that he had been starved before dying.
* {{Blackmail}}: After Karen lies for Adrian, she attempts to blackmail him into marriage. For once a blackmailer survives on this show! Though the murderer takes the chance to remove himself from her grasp by accepting his arrest.
* BothSidesHaveAPoint: Of the JerkassHasAPoint variety. Rick is a hedonist who plays fast and loose with the family fortune, but he calls out his half-brother on how he indulges in a portion his own produce instead of selling it to make a profit. Adrian is a snob who hardly even utilizes the business lucratively, but he recognizes his half-brother is grossly selling out the business to an inferior company, just to make a quick buck for [[AllForNothing a wedding to a girl he might not even stay with]].

* ChekhovsGun: Columbo works out that Adrian left his brother to suffocate in his wine cellar through shutting off the air conditioning and sealing the room off by stealing a bottle of expensive wine and having it served at an apology meal for Adrian at an expensive restaurant. Since Adrian was on a trip in New York, he had no idea that one of the hottest days on record took place while he was gone. Due to the air conditioning being off, every bottle of expensive wine was heated by the ambient temperature in the room in excess of 150 degrees, so when Adrian loudly crows that the wine has spoiled, it gives Columbo the evidence he needs to explain how Rick was emaciated and died from suffocation before he was disposed of in the water.
* ChekhovsSkill: As Adrian is a wine connoisseur, he's able to pick up on subtle nuances in wine that others with less experience would miss. This is eventually his undoing. Columbo suspects that Adrian locked his brother Rick in the wine cellar and left him there to suffocate, but can't find the proof, until he discovers one of the days Carsini was gone in New York was one of the hottest on record. He secretly has one of Adrian's private stock served to him at dinner, and while neither Columbo nor Karen notice anything off, Adrian immediately notices that the wine has been overheated and oxidized. This confirms Columbo's suspicion that Rick had to be locked in there, and that Adrian shut off the air conditioning to suffocate him, unwittingly ruining his entire private wine collection in the process. Adrian even lampshades this when Columbo comes to confront him with the evidence, and states he's one of the few people with a palate refined enough to be able to notice the wine was bad, and laughingly admits that his skill has sealed his fate.

* JerkassHasAPoint: Adrian's brother may have been a jerk, but he's right about Adrian's poor business sense.

* BothSidesHaveAPoint: Of the JerkassHasAPoint variety. Ric is a hedonist who plays fast and loose with the family fortune, but he calls out his half-brother on how he indulges in a portion his own produce instead of selling it to make a profit. Adrian is a snob who hardly even utilizes the business lucratively, but he recognizes his half-brother is grossly selling out the business to an inferior company, just to make a quick buck for [[AllForNothing a wedding to a girl he might not even stay with]].
* ChairReveal: How Ric surprises his brother in his office.
* ChekhovsGun: Columbo works out that Adrian left his brother to suffocate in his wine cellar through shutting off the air conditioning and sealing the room off by stealing a bottle of expensive wine and having it served at an apology meal for Adrian at an expensive restaurant. Since Adrian was on a trip in New York, he had no idea that one of the hottest days on record took place while he was gone. Due to the air conditioning being off, every bottle of expensive wine was heated by the ambient temperature in the room in excess of 150 degrees, so when Adrian loudly crows that the wine has spoiled, it gives Columbo the evidence he needs to explain how Ric was emaciated and died from suffocation before he was disposed of in the water.
* ChekhovsSkill: As Adrian is a wine connoisseur, he's able to pick up on subtle nuances in wine that others with less experience would miss. This is eventually his undoing. Columbo suspects that Adrian locked his brother Ric in the wine cellar and left him there to suffocate, but can't find the proof, until he discovers one of the days Carsini was gone in New York was one of the hottest on record. He secretly has one of Adrian's private stock served to him at dinner, and while neither Columbo nor Karen notice anything off, Adrian immediately notices that the wine has been overheated and oxidized. This confirms Columbo's suspicion that Ric had to be locked in there, and that Adrian shut off the air conditioning to suffocate him, unwittingly ruining his entire private wine collection in the process. Adrian even lampshades this when Columbo comes to confront him with the evidence, and states he's one of the few people with a palate refined enough to be able to notice the wine was bad, and laughingly admits that his skill has sealed his fate.

* CruelAndUnusualDeath: Adrian leaves Ric locked in his wine cellar with the air turned off to suffocate. He survives two days without any food or water before finally expiring.

* GoodIsNotNice: ''Severely'' downplayed given the context, but when revealing how he figured out Adrian murdered his brother, he admits to having done a "bad thing": stealing a bottle of wine from Adrian's own vault.

* {{Irony}}: When Adrian and Ric's father died, he left Adrian the family fortune and Ric ownership of the winery. However, Ric has no higher ideals around wine and is content to live a playboy lifestyle while Adrian is a wine connoisseur and extremely passionate about the craft but also shown to be poor at handling money. Both sons would have probably been better off if they had the other's inheritance.
* JerkAss: Both Ric and Adrian. Ric wastes his money on the high life and frequent failed marriages, and while the winery and land are his, and he only allows Adrian to run it because he wanted Adrian to make a profit for him, it's hard to feel sympathy when Ric tells him he's selling out to the Marino Brothers, and joking that maybe they'll let Adrian, who's put his entire life into the winery for decades, lick the labels. Adrian is sympathetic to a point, but not only does he run the business into the ground by insisting on bottling wines few people will ever be able to afford to buy, he also frequently goes out and spends upwards of $5,000 a bottle or more on wines that he's solely keeping for himself in his wine collection. Also, Ric's latest intended bride seemed completely in love with Ric, and is completely destroyed when she discovers he's dead, and later, that he's been likely murdered. Still, thanks to Creator/DonaldPleasence's portrayal of Adrian, you end up having more sympathy for him than for Ric.

* LadykillerInLove: Ric has been in several failed marriages with loose women and gets defensive about his new girlfriend when Adrian brings this up. However, when we meet his new prospective bride, she's a stable, friendly, woman who seems to have genuinely loved Ric for who he was and not his money. Naturally, she's heartbroken to learn he died.
* LifesWorkRuined: Adrian murders Ric by leaving him bound in his wine vault and turning off the air conditioner so he suffocates. However, while he is away, there is an unexpectedly hot day that raises the temperature in the uncooled vault to the point where the wine oxidizes, destroying his priceless collection.

* MomentOfWeakness: Subverted. Adrian originally attacks Ric in a rage, immediately after rubbing his nose in the fact that his life's work and passion is about to be handed over to the wine equivalent of Walmart for low-quality mass production. This is, if not excusable, at least ''somewhat'' sympathetic and understandable. But after clubbing his brother unconscious, Adrian then decides to throw him into the wine vault to suffocate to death over the course of several days, a colder act of premeditation that [[LaserGuidedKarma destroys his priceless collection and sows the seeds of his own doom]].

* PhenotypeStereotype: Averted. Ric (full name Enrico Giuseppe Carsini) is of Italian ancestry, but doesn't look it, according to Columbo. His fiancée explains that the family comes from Milan.

** While Columbo talks to her, Rick's fiance mentions how Ric's motivation for getting more money was so they could have a luxurious wedding and honey moon. She brings up she would've been content with a simple wedding with no big splash. Had she made it clear to Rick, he might not have tried to convince Adrian to sell the vineyard, Adrian wouldn't have killed Rick, and the two parties would've been happier for it.
** For that matter, the Carsinis' father implicitly recognized that each of his sons was HisOwnWorstEnemy and tried to short-circuit their worst impulses by giving Ric, who had a taste for the playboy high life, the family wineyard and Adrian, whose passionate perfectionism would prove an obstacle to actually turning a profit on their product, the family fortune. It backfired spectacularly, since Adrian proved a poor businessman who squandered the family's wealth on his wine collection and Ric, who had no interest in wine, just hired his brother to manage the business in his stead.

* TrophyViolence: Adrian knocks Ric out cold by hitting him with a trophy.
* TooCleverByHalf: Adrian probably would've gotten away with his murder if he simply killed Ric by hitting him on the head again and then buried him in the woods or something rather than concocting the scuba diving ruse.
* WineIsClassy: The whole basis of Carsini's character. He views wine as SeriousBusiness. Also his motive for murder, as Ric is going to sell the vineyard to a mass marketing company, which offends Adrian the wine snob.

* BigEater: Ric was one which makes Columbo suspicious when the autopsy on his body shows that he had been starved before dying.

* BothSidesHaveAPoint: Of the JerkHasAPoint variety. Ric is a hedonist who plays fast and loose with the family fortune, but he calls out his half-brother on how he indulges in a portion his own produce instead of selling it to make a profit. Adrian is a snob who hardly even utilizes the business lucratively, but he recognizes his half-brother is grossly selling out the business to an inferior company, just to make a quick buck for [[AllForNothing a wedding to a girl he might not even stay with]].

* AllForNothing: To keep control of the Carsini Winery, and keep Ric from selling it off to cut-rate winemakers The Marino Brothers, Adrian suffocates Rick in his wine cellar and disposes of his body as though it was a scuba accident. This only serves to tip off Columbo, as the method used to kill Rick, by shutting off the air conditioning to his wine cellar rather than just finishing him off with another blow to the head, left him dehydrated and malnourished before death, quite unlike what a healthy eater like Rick would be before diving. Columbo concludes that Rick was dead before he was ever in the water. Also, shutting off the air conditioning ruins Adrian's entire wine collection, save what he'd recently bought in New York, due to a particularly hot day when Adrian was out of town, allowing the wine to overheat and oxidize. By the end of the episode, Adrian is en route to prison, and has lost both his winery and virtually his entire wine collection.

* AffablyEvil: Despite being a self-admittedly remorseless murderer, Adrian's [[DoingItForTheArt passionate about his art]] and [[PetTheDog pays his people well]]. He polite to Columbo and ends up forming a sort of friendship with him by the end; despite being a huge wine snob he seems to enjoy helping Columbo cultivate an appreciation for his passion rather than being a nasty gatekeeper. He takes his defeat with grace and the two share a last glass of wine before Columbo takes him to the police station.

** What drives Carsini over the edge is when his brother mocks him about how he's going to sell the vineyard to the Marino Brothers, a mass market wine company, but tells Adrian he'll be taken care of, and maybe the Marino Brothers will allow Carsini to "lick the labels."

* MomentOfWeakness: Subverted. Adrian originally attacks Ric in a rage, immediately after rubbing his nose in the fact that his life's work and passion is about to be handed over to the wine equivalent of Walmart for low-quality mass production. But after clubbing his brother unconscious, Adrian then decides to throw him into the wine vault to suffocate to death over the course of several days, and in the process [[LaserGuidedKarma destroys his priceless collection and sows the seeds of his own doom]].

* PoorCommunicationKills: While Columbo talks to her, Rick's fiance mentions how Ric's motivation for getting more money was so they could have a luxurious wedding and honey moon. She brings up she would've been content with a simple wedding with no big splash. Had she made it clear to Rick, he might not have tried to convince Adrian to sell the vineyard, Adrian wouldn't have killed Rick, and the two parties would've been happier for it.

* AffablyEvil: Despite being a murderer, Adrian's [[DoingItForTheArt passionate about his art]] and [[PetTheDog pays his people well]]. He polite to Columbo and ends up forming a sort of friendship with him by the end; despite being a huge wine snob he seems to enjoy helping Columbo cultivate an appreciation for his passion rather than being a nasty gatekeeper. He takes his defeat with grace and the two share a last glass of wine before Columbo takes him to the police station.

* AffablyEvil: Despite being a murderer, Adrian is polite to Columbo and ends up forming a sort of friendship with him by the end. He takes his defeat with grace and the two share a last glass of wine before Columbo takes him to the police station.

Guest Starring: Creator/DonaldPleasence, Creator/GaryConway, Creator/JulieHarris]

* EntitledToHaveYou: Karen is a realistic form of this trope. Rather than simply being a mustache-twirling type trying to trap their love interest in marriage, her mindset of marrying off Adrian is built on the belief that because she sacrificed 12 years being his dutiful secretary, he owes her his affection.

* OhCrap: When Columbo talks about how the week previous (when Adrian had tied his brother up in the wine cellar and turned off the A/C so he'd suffocate) there was a day when the temperature unexpectedly shot to 109F, Adrian's eyes go wide for a moment as he realizes the implications for his wine collection.
* PetTheDog: Twice over does Columbo treat Adrian kindly after the latter has been arrested. When Adrian worries about how his family's winery will go on after his arrest, Columbo assures him it will continue to thrive in his absence. And as a consolation, he and Adrian share one last bottle of wine together.

* TrophyViolence: Adrian knocks Ric out cold by hitting him with a a trophy.

* ChekhovsSkill: As Adrian is a wine connoisseur, he's able to pick up on subtle nuances in wine that others with less experience would miss. This is eventually his undoing. Columbo suspects that Adrian locked his brother Ric in the wine cellar and left him there to suffocate, but can't find the proof, until he discovers one of the days Carsini was gone in New York was one of the hottest on record. He secretly has one of Adrian's private stock served to him at dinner, and while neither Columbo nor Karen notice anything off, Adrian immediately notices that the wine has been overheated and oxidized. This confirms Columbo's suspicion that Ric had to be locked in there, and that Adrian shut off the air conditioning to suffocate him, unwittingly ruining his entire private wine collection in the process. Adrian even lampshades this when Columbo comes to confront him with the evidence, and states he's one of the few people with a palate strong enough to be able to notice the wine was bad, and laughingly admits that his skill has sealed his fate.

* AllForNothing: To keep control of the Carsini Winery, and keep Ric from selling it off to cut-rate winemakers The Marino Brothers, Adrian suffocates Ric in his wine cellar and disposes of his body as though it was a scuba accident. Not only does he get caught by Columbo, but the method he used to kill Ric by shutting off the air conditioning to his wine cellar rather than just finishing him off with another blow to the head, not only tips off Columbo, as he was dehydrated and malnourished before death, quite unlike what a healthy eater like Ric would be before diving, that Ric was dead before he was in the water. Also, shutting off the air ruins Adrian's entire wine collection, (Save what he'd recently bought in New York,) due to a super hot day when Adrian was out of town, allowing the wine to overheat and oxidize. By the end of the episode, Adrian is en route to prison, and has lost his winery, and virtually his entire wine collection.

** Columbo steals a wine bottle from Adrian's cellar, which becomes the main proof that Adrian turned off the air conditioning in order to kill Ric. Not only would this be thrown out in court, Columbo could be charged with theft.

* ArtisticLicenseLaw: Columbo undertakes to search for a missing man before there is any sign that he's dead, much less dead by violence. In real life, it's doubtful that a homicide detective would be allowed to spend his time this way.
** Lampshaded as Carsini out and out asks Columbo why he's working this case when it wasn't a clear murder or even a clear suicide. (Columbo's answer: "I just go where they tell me to.")

* {{Blackmail}}: After Karen lies for Adrian, she attempts to blackmail him into marriage. For once a blackmailer survives on this show!