An employee of a Burgundian wine house is suspected of stealing more than 7,000 bottles worth half a million euros from his employer, we learned in court on Thursday French, a theft that is among the most important in the history of wine.
• Also read: Spain: A man breaks into a famous cellar and spills 60,000 liters of wine
This 56-year-old man was arrested and placed under judicial supervision until his trial this summer, Dijon prosecutor Olivier Caracotch told AFP.
The man is suspected, according to the same source, of stealing “thousands of bottles over several years” from his employers, wineries in Beaune, in the heart of France's prestigious wine region.
Almost 7,000 bottles were found at his home and the damage amounted to more than 500,000 euros, the public prosecutor's office said.
According to the Journal de Saône-et-Loire, which uncovered the affair, the clerk was caught on a surveillance camera stealing four bottles.
After a complaint from his employer, he was arrested and his house searched. The investigators then discovered several wine cellars and thousands of bottles, including the employee's boss's own, but also those of other wine houses where the defendant worked.
The latter is said to have accumulated his loot over around fifteen years and also lined the walls of another cellar in his mother's house.
According to the local newspaper, prices for bottles, sometimes great wines like the prestigious Vosne-Romanée, can exceed 1,000 euros.
However, “there is no evidence in the proceedings that he resold a single bottle,” states the public prosecutor.
This theft is among the largest of its kind, comparable to the theft in 2019 of around a hundred cases of Petrus, Mouton-Rothschild as well as a bottle of the very prestigious Romanée-Conti from the home of a Bordeaux broker, a Burgundy that prides itself on being the most expensive wine in the world. The damage also amounted to half a million euros.
This was followed in 2007 by the burglary of a warehouse in a suburb of Bordeaux with an estimated amount of 400,000 euros.
In Burgundy, one of the biggest thefts remains that of more than 3,000 bottles from a winery in Vosne-Romanée, stolen twice: on December 31, 2018 and then on March 17, 2019. The total damage was estimated at 179,000 euros.