Thieves drove off with 30,000 bottles of Italian wine worth 5 million euros

At least seven masked men with two large trucks took about 30,000 bottles of some of the most sought-after red wine in Italy, Italian media say. It happened at a storage site in Tuscany owned by Marchesi Antinori, one of the biggest family-owned wine houses in the country. The BBC reports that the bottles are worth about 5 million euros, or 4.2 million pounds.

The company says the theft took place on Saturday 3 October. Staff were getting a shipment ready for customers abroad. Nobody saw what had happened until Monday morning.

No one has been arrested.

How do seven men empty a storage site without anyone noticing?

By switching off everything that could see them.

The BBC says at least seven masked men are believed to have turned off the alarms and the cameras. Then they did not bring their own machines. They used the company's forklifts.

They loaded two big trucks with the family's prized Tuscan reds. Then they drove away.

Think about how long that takes. A forklift moves one pallet at a time. Filling two trucks with 30,000 bottles is slow, heavy work. A standard case holds 6 or 12 bottles, so the haul is somewhere between 2,500 and 5,000 cases. Every one of them had to be lifted, stacked and strapped down in the dark.

Which wines were taken, and what are they worth?

The thieves went for three names. The BBC lists Tignanello, Solaia and Guado al Tasso. These are often called Super Tuscans, Tuscan reds that became famous for their price.

The company says the bottles usually sell for between 150 and 500 euros each. Here is a plain look at the numbers.

Notice the average. At about 167 euros a bottle, the 5 million euro figure sits near the cheap end of that price range. If many of these bottles sell for more, the true shop value could be higher than the headlines say.

Photo: The original uploader was BMK at German Wikipedia. / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0 de

Did the thieves have inside help?

The company thinks they knew a lot.

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The BBC says the choice of bottles suggests the thieves were wine connoisseurs with inside knowledge. They did not grab random crates. They took the wines that sell for the most money.

That is the company's belief for now. Nobody has been charged.

The chief executive, Renzo Cotarella, told the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera that a theft of this size has never happened in Italy. He told the Financial Times that he does not see how the thieves can sell this much wine around the world without being seen.

He is hopeful the police can follow the trail. Two trucks full of goods, he said, cannot just vanish into thin air. Tuscan roads are full of cameras.

Where do you hide 30,000 bottles of famous wine?

This is the question hanging over the whole case.

You cannot easily sell thousands of bottles of Solaia at the corner shop. Buyers, auction houses and collectors like to know where a bottle has been. A sudden flood of rare bottles with no history is the sort of thing people notice.

These labels have been in the crime news before. In 2019, Wine Spectator reported that Italian police arrested three people over a plan to sell at least 11,000 fake bottles of Tignanello, filled with cheap wine. The name on the label is worth enough that people have tried to copy it.

Now somebody may be sitting on 30,000 real ones. Money crimes this big tend to leave a trail, as the story of the CIA officer who invented secret missions and walked off with almost $200 million shows.

Photo: TeKappa / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

Is this the only big wine theft in Italy this year?

No. The BBC says there has been a spate of wine thefts in Italy this year. It names two in Piedmont, in the north, where bottles worth hundreds of thousands of euros were reportedly taken.

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One of them was in September. Vinetur reported on 22 September that thieves took more than 3,000 bottles of Barolo from the winery Conterno Fantino in Monforte d'Alba. Four men were said to have crossed the vineyards on foot at night with their faces covered. They spent about three hours inside, and a forklift was used there too.

The Antinori raid is ten times the size of that one.

The timeline so far is below.

The Barolo date is approximate. Vinetur only said "in recent days" on 22 September.

Why does Italian wine carry so much money?

Because the best bottles cost like a night out for four, one bottle at a time. At 150 to 500 euros each, a single case of six can be worth up to 3,000 euros. South Africa's Cape sells wine abroad too, as this look at what the Western Cape exports shows.

How old is the family behind the bottles?

Very old. The BBC says Marchesi Antinori was founded in 1385 and now sells to 170 countries.

That is a company older than the printing press. Now it has lost 30,000 bottles in one weekend, and the people who took them have a head start of days.

What happens when one of those bottles turns up?

Somebody, somewhere, will open a box and see a Solaia label. They will check the stamp and the year.

It might be in a shop. It might come up at an auction in a country far from Tuscany. Every bottle that appears is a clue.

For now, two trucks full of Italy's most prized red wine are somewhere out there, and nobody has said where they stopped.