Wine bottles worth 5 million euros stolen from Tuscany winery in Italy

Thieves in Italy pulled off a heist of about 30,000 bottles of high-end red wine worth over 5 million euros from a winery in Tuscany.

Given the number of bottles stolen and their estimated market value, the producer describes the incident as the country's largest wine theft ever reported.

Local police are examining surveillance footage and other evidence while conducting an extensive manhunt, but have yet to make any arrests.

At least seven masked men on Saturday night broke into the facility of the Marchesi Antinori vineyard near Cortona in the province of Arezzo and stole at least 50 pallets of wine that were ready to be shipped.

The missing bottles were all from the 2023 vintage.

They include Solaia, Tignanello and Guado al Tasso, some of the winery's most sought-after labels that are typically sold at a retail price of between 150 and 300 euros each.

The theft was discovered earlier in October but was only made public on Friday to avoid interfering with the investigation. Authorities are looking into how the stolen wine may be sold.

Marchesi Antinori's CEO Renzo Cotarella notes he remains confident that the shipment could be tracked down by investigators because the thieves hauled off their booty in two massive trucks. He says two truckloads of merchandise can't just disappear into thin air and that it would be difficult to move them without attracting attention.

Cotarella says: "So, it's an incredible number of bottles, it never happened. This is the reason why, for instance, we didn't have even the insurance to cover all this amount of wine because it never happened, in history, not just in our history. And so we were, you know, quite sure that it couldn't happen. So, they were professional because it was not easy. They did everything very quickly. They were very well organised."

The chief executive also sounds the alarm for potential buyers that wines offered to them from unspecified sources at cheap prices may be stolen property.

There has been a spate of high-profile wine robberies in Italy in recent years, including a 2017 incident at a warehouse near the Adriatic resort town of Cervia where about 2,000 bottles of rare wines valued at 750,000 euros were taken.