Burgundy wine estate worker stole bottles worth £430,000 – and didn’t drink a drop

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A maintenance technician stole wine worth around  €500,000 (£430,000) from leading Burgundy estates over 15 years – and left his haul completely untouched.

The 57-year-old man,  who worked for various wine estates around the town of Beaune, appeared in court on Tuesday on charges of stealing up to 8,000 bottles of wine.

It is thought to be one of the largest cellar thefts in French history, but not a single drop of the wine appeared to have been drunk.

The man, who has not been named, was arrested earlier this year after a security camera caught him pilfering four bottles of wine from an employer, who went to the police.

A search of the cellars at his house and his mother’s house uncovered the four bottles and another 7,000 to 8,000 accumulated over 15 years from wine estates where he had worked, according to Olivier Caracotch, the Dijon prosecutor.

The haul included grands crus from producers in Vosne-Romanée that can fetch more than €1,000. However, the prosecutor said after his arrest that “nothing indicates he had sold a single bottle”.

And instead of savouring some of the great Burgundy wines listed by investigators, he left them all intact. The bottles were all returned to their owners, according to France Bleu Bourgogne, the local radio station, citing investigative sources.

‘Half-kleptomaniac, half collector’

In police custody, the man explained that he had no desire for financial gain or to drink the finest of wines but simply to “sit in the middle of his cellars to contemplate them”.

Describing him as “half-kleptomaniac, half-collector”, detectives said that he had a modest lifestyle and was a trusted employee who aroused no suspicion until CCTV caught him in the act of stealing bottles.

One of his main alleged victims was Albert Bichot. In operation since 1831, Maison Bichot owns vineyards in six estates that cover Burgundy from north to south, from Chablis to Beaujolais, and is a civil plaintiff in the case.

Given that it retrieved all the lost bottles, the wine house is only claiming a symbolic one euro from the defendant, who has pleaded guilty.

French TV news channel CNews called it the joint biggest cellar heist in French history.

It is on a par with the theft in 2019 from the home of a Bordeaux wine broker of around a hundred cases of Petrus, and Mouton-Rothschild, along with a bottle of Romanée-Conti Burgundy, said to be the most expensive wine in the world. That loss was also estimated at more than half a million euros.

The case continues.

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