30,000 bottles of wine worth €5 million were stolen from a well-known Italian winery

Professional thieves stole 30,000 bottles of wine with a total value of about €5 million from the warehouse of Marchesi Antinori, Italy’s largest family-owned winery, in Tuscany, the Financial Times reported. According to the winery’s estimates, this is one of the largest wine thefts in recent memory. It may turn out to be the largest in Italy and beyond, both in terms of the volume and the value of the stolen bottles, the newspaper reports.

Antinori, founded as far back as 1385, told the FT that last weekend (October 3–4), thieves broke into its warehouse in Cortona, Tuscany. This occurred just as the winery was preparing to ship a large consignment of its most valuable bottles to international customers. On Saturday night, seven masked men disabled the alarm system and loaded thousands of cases of famous Tuscan red wines—Tignanello, Solaia, and Guado al Tasso—onto two large trucks, the FT reports. These wines typically retail for between €150 and €500 per bottle. The theft was not discovered until Monday morning, when employees arrived at work. The company has surveillance footage, and police are investigating, the newspaper reports.

The company decided to publicly announce the theft in the hope that Italian wine lovers would help find the missing bottles, said Antinori CEO Renzo Cotarella. “We still hope to find the wine... “Two trucks can’t just vanish,” he said. “These wines are very expensive, and I don’t understand how it’s possible to sell all of this around the world without anyone noticing.” According to him, the winery also wants to “protect the market” by warning potential buyers that bottles offered by dubious sources at tempting prices may turn out to be stolen.

The winery's revenue for last year totaled about €263 million, and its products are shipped to 170 countries, the FT noted.

Wine thefts are not uncommon in Italy, but the victims are usually Michelin-starred restaurants with well-stocked cellars, from which only a few particularly valuable bottles worth tens of thousands of euros are stolen, according to the Financial Times. For example, this summer, two men wearing helmets and work clothes cut holes in the shatterproof glass of Milan’s Affinatore restaurant and made off with several bottles of Romanée-Conti worth a total of €280,000, the newspaper reported.

Professional thieves have also set their sights on the wineries themselves. This summer, the historic Banfi di Montalcino reported the theft of 3,000 bottles of Alta Langa wine from its warehouse in Piedmont, the FT noted. According to the company, the thieves “carefully selected the bottles,” and their choice showed that they “knew exactly what they were doing.”

A month earlier, four robbers used a forklift to steal 3,000 bottles of Barolo from the Conterno Fantino winery’s warehouse (also in Piedmont) in less than three hours.

This article was AI-translated and verified by a human editor