Italy’s biggest family-owned winery, Marchesi Antinori, says professional thieves stole 30,000 bottles of wine worth about €5mn from its storage facility in Tuscany in what it believes to be one of the largest wine thefts in recent history.
It is the latest in a series of wine heists in Italy, carried out by criminals whose careful selection of bottles reflected wine connoisseurship and inside knowledge of their targets.
Florence-based Antinori, which traces its origins back to 1385, told the FT the thieves last weekend targeted its warehouse in Cortona, Tuscany, just as the winery was preparing to ship a large consignment of some of its most valuable bottles to customers abroad.
Seven masked men disabled the alarm system and hauled off their booty — thousands of cases of the winery’s famous Tignanello, Solaia and Guado al Tasso Tuscan reds — in two massive trucks on Saturday night. The stolen bottles typically retail for between €150-€500 each.
The theft was not discovered until Monday morning, when employees arrived to find the wine was gone. The winery has extensive surveillance camera footage of the theft. Police are investigating but have yet to make any arrests.
Renzo Cotarella, Antinori’s chief executive, said the company, which had revenues of about €263mn last year and exports to 170 countries, was sounding the alarm in the hope that oenophiles in Italy may help them track down the missing bottles.
“We still hope we are able to find the wine . . . two trucks cannot just disappear,” Cotarella said. “These wines have a great value and I don’t know how they can sell all this wine around the world without being seen.”
He said Antinori also wanted to “protect the market” by alerting potential buyers that bottles offered to them from unusual sources at tempting prices may be stolen property.
Wine theft is not unusual in Italy, but thieves have typically targeted Michelin-starred restaurants with well-stocked wine cellars and made off with a handful of highly valuable bottles worth tens of thousands of euros each.
This summer, for example, two men dressed as workers wearing hard hats and high-visibility vests managed to open holes in shatterproof glass at Milan’s famed Affinatore restaurant to seize several bottles of prized Romanée-Conti wine worth a total of €280,000.
Bottles are also occasionally stolen from trucks while in transit.
Professional thieves this summer targeted wineries where thousands of bottles have been carted away from their climate-controlled storage facilities over a period of hours.
This summer, the historic Banfi di Montalcino reported 3,000 bottles of its best Alta Langa wines had been stolen from its warehouse in Piedmont by thieves who “carefully selected the bottles” and whose choices suggested “they knew exactly what they were doing”.
Last month, four thieves seized 3,000 bottles of popular Barolo wines at the Conterno Fantino winery, also in Piedmont, in just under three hours with the aid of a forklift in the warehouse.
But the theft at Antinori is thought to be the biggest in Italy — and internationally — both in terms of the volume and value of the bottles taken.
“People at the winery were crying,” Cotarella said. “It’s not just the value of the wine — it’s something more. We can survive without this wine, but what makes me so sad is the fact that this could happen to us.”