The Five Greatest Wine Heists

We all love a great heist film -- Pink Panther, Thomas Crown Affair, The Italian Job --  hell, even the Great Muppet Caper registers classic by our standards. So what happens when fine wine, not cash, jewels, or art, is the object of pursuit? The general population doesn’t extend a great deal of sympathy to the uber-wealthy who have lost a few prized, luxury items. In these instances, the winemaker is not losing any income and the world is not losing a cultural artifact. And so we observe these thefts of the 1%, from our middle-income vantage, with a healthy dose of cynicism and a nod to their entertainment value.

Just imagine Miles, the protagonist of wine film Sideways, knocking over an auction house to get his hands on a whole pallet of 1961 Château Cheval Blanc. Inevitably, everything would go wrong, just as it did for our first theives...

The French Laundry Grinch Who Stole Christmas

On Dec. 25, 2014, someone broke into the front door of Thomas Keller’s French Laundry restaurant in Yountville, CA. Just one day after the restaurant had closed for renovations, the thief stole 76 bottles of wine totaling $300,000, including vertical collections of Burgundies from Domaine de la Romanee Conti, and renown Napa Cabernet Sauvignon, Screaming Eagle. Investigators suspect it had to be someone who knew the restaurant well, in order to identify the unmarked cellar door, and carefully select which wines would bring the highest value. In less than a month, most of the wine was discovered in Greensboro, North Carolina, some 3,000 miles away from the three Michelin-star touting restaurant.

Bottle Status: partially recovered

The Thanksgiving Day Botched Job

On Thanksgiving day in 2013, two men entered the Esquin Wine & Spirits storage facility in Seattle. They spray painted surveillance cameras and disabled motion detectors. The following day the it took nine trips to steal 200 cases of high-end wine totalling almost $650,000. The thieves then tampered with gas lines in a half-baked attempted to cause a fire or explosion. By the next day a building employee smelled gas, reported it, and the robbery was discovered. The men had made little effort to cover their tracks -- they missed one surveillance camera which captured their images, they had a list of wines that matched those they had stolen, and they moved the loot to another wine facility that was established in one of the perpetrator’s names. The Deputy Prosecutor in the case called the crime “the poorest execution of the greatest heist of wine.” Both men are serving time.

Bottle Status: recovered

To Market, To Market

Shortly after closing his eponymous Chicago restaurant in 2012, the late Charlie Trotter boxed up all the wine in the restaurant’s renown cellar and sent it to market. The market was Christie’s auction house, where around 330 cases were expected to earn the celebrity chef over $1 million. En route to New York, 60 cases of wine went missing. In the end, Trotter made out okay and the lot earned over $1.1 million in spite of the missing wine. Factor in the insurance reparations and we’re guessing he was less than devastated.

Bottle Status: missing

The Inside Job

Legend Cellars in Orange County, CA, is a private wine storage facility where collectors cellar their wine in a temperature-controlled environment. Wine owners keep their own lock, and make an annual payment for storage. Because of his after-hours access, it’s easy to understand how George Osumi, the father of the storage facility’s owner could quietly swipe bottles of wine from the private lockers for four years. Osumi stole $2.7 million before he was caught convicted in August, 2013. One obvious indicator that collectors had been looted -- Osumi switched bottles worth hundreds for $5 supermarket bottles. He is now serving six years for identity, insurance, and tax fraud.

Bottle Status: partially recovered

I’ll Just Take the One

Hopkinton Wine & Spirits in Boston, MA, may want to rethink their bottle security. In 2009, a woman distracted the retail clerk while two men made a grab for four bottles and shoved the wine in their pants. One bottle, a 1945 Chateau Mouton Rothschild valued at $20,000 was simply nicked from the cooler. That particular vintage was bottled just months after French winemakers regained their beloved Bordeaux wine region from Nazi occupation. Four days after the wine was stolen, an anonymous tip clued investigators to the bottle’s whereabouts and the bottle was safely returned. We can only hope Hopkinton has at least moved their valuable bottles behind the counter.

Bottle Status: recovered