A masked crew broke into a prominent Tuscan winery over the weekend and drove off with 30,000 bottles of luxury vintage red wine worth at least 5 million euros, officials said Friday.
The break-in occurred Saturday night at a Marchesi Antinori storage depot near Cortona, in Italy’s Arezzo province, as workers prepared shipments destined for foreign markets. The company, an historic family-run winemaker established in 1385, delayed making the theft public until Friday to prevent disrupting law enforcement efforts, ABC News reported.
Inside job suspected after alarms disabled
Investigators believe a team of at least seven masked intruders shut off security alarms and deactivated surveillance equipment before entering the facility. Lorenzo Vivoli, a spokesperson for Antinori, told Fortune that the security alarms had been switched off from inside the structure the day before the heist. “It’s as if they already knew everything,” Vivoli said.
Once inside, the intruders operated Antinori’s forklifts to pack two large commercial trucks with crates of wine before escaping into the night. Workers only realized the facility had been emptied when they arrived on Monday morning, according to BBC News.
Chief Executive Renzo Cotarella told the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera that the operation represented the biggest theft of its kind across the nation. Cotarella noted that the winery had previously considered the risk of losing cases during shipping, but never imagined an entire warehouse heist of this scale.
Prized vintages face difficult black market resale
The stolen stock was largely from the 2023 vintage, featuring the estate’s top-tier labels: Tignanello, Solaia and Guado al Tasso. Fortune reported that the thieves took roughly 10,000 bottles of each label. The Guardian also reported that the haul included 3,000 bottles of Barolo Ginestra, some in magnum sizes. The bottles generally retail between 150 euros and 500 euros each, though their total value could reach $8.2 million based on average U.S. retail prices, Fortune reported.
The company confirmed that its existing insurance policy did not cover a loss of this magnitude, according to Corriere della Sera. Marchesi Antinori is now alerting distributors and consumers across its 170 export destinations to remain alert for suspicious bottles being marketed outside legitimate channels.
Company executives expressed hope that police and Carabinieri officers would be able to intercept the stolen consignment. Because high-end wines are allocated in strictly monitored quantities, flooding the market with thousands of premium bottles is likely to raise immediate flags. “Two trucks full of merchandise can’t just disappear into thin air,” Cotarella told Corriere della Sera, pointing to highway traffic surveillance cameras throughout the Tuscan countryside.
The break-in follows a recent string of wine warehouse burglaries in Italy, including thefts reported in the northern Piedmont region. As of Friday, authorities had not announced any arrests or publicly identified any suspects in the heist.
