Thieves Disabled Alarms From Inside Before Stealing 30,000 Bottles of Antinori Wine in Tuscany

Masked thieves emptied a Marchesi Antinori warehouse in Cortona, Tuscany, of about 30,000 bottles of some of Italy's most collected wine, and the alarms never sounded because they had been switched off from inside the building the day before the heist. Lorenzo Vivoli, who works in Antinori's communications office, said the crew appeared to know the facility's layout and schedule in advance. «It's as if they already knew everything,» Vivoli said.

The theft unfolded over roughly three hours on a Saturday night. The thieves arrived with two trucks and found the bottles already packed and waiting to be shipped to Antinori's export markets. They took approximately 10,000 bottles each of Tignanello, Solaia and Guado al Tasso, all from the 2023 vintage. At average U.S. retail prices of about $430 a bottle for Solaia, $200 for Tignanello and $190 for Guado al Tasso, the stolen wine is worth about $8.2 million. Antinori put its European-market loss at about €5 million. Either figure would make it the most valuable single wine or spirits theft on record.

Antinori CEO Renzo Cotarella described the operation as highly organized. «This is a theft of unprecedented scale for the wine industry in Italy, carried out by a group that was clearly highly organized and well prepared,» he said. Vivoli called it «the biggest theft in the history of wine,» adding that nothing comparable had ever occurred. The previous Italian record was a 2017 theft in Cervia worth €750,000, while the costliest case on a Drinks Business list of major heists was a $2.7 million scheme at Legend Cellars in Irvine, California, in 2015.

Antinori does not know how the alarms were disabled, and a police investigation is ongoing. Investigators have not named any suspects, and no one has been arrested. The company has surveillance video, but police have asked it not to release the footage while the inquiry continues.

The stolen wines have long been targets for counterfeiters. In 2019, Italian police arrested three people in a scheme to sell at least 11,000 counterfeit bottles of Tignanello in Italy, Germany and Belgium, labeled as 2009, 2010 and 2011 vintages but filled with low-quality wine. The case began when a print shop in Pistoia received an order for more than 4,000 Tignanello labels from a self-styled «Mr. Rossi» who claimed to act for the company. The fake back labels misspelled «altitudine» as «altidudine.» Separately, a ring sold more than 54,000 counterfeit bottles into Switzerland between 2016 and 2018 under the names of top Italian wineries, including Marchesi Antinori.

Antinori has marked its bottles against fakes for years. Starting with the 2013 vintage, it added an embossed logo, then an embossed Tignanello name, and since 2016 a small label that anyone can scan with a phone to check whether a bottle is real. But the stickers do not track where a bottle goes. «They don't help us find the stolen bottles,» Vivoli said.

Instead, Antinori is counting on how difficult the wine will be to sell. «A quantity of around 30,000 bottles is difficult to move and put back on the market without leaving a trace,» Cotarella said. Because the three wines are sold in small allocations, a large supply appearing at once would draw attention. «These 30,000 bottles won't vanish into thin air,» Vivoli said. «It will be very hard for them.» The company is warning partners and customers in the 170 countries it exports to about offers outside official channels.

The United States is Antinori's largest market outside Italy, and Italian wine sales there were already under strain. Exports to the U.S. fell 17% in value in the first year after the introduction of tariffs, a loss of more than €340 million, according to the trade group Unione Italiana Vini. Americans had stockpiled Italian wine before the tariffs took effect, while in Italy buying stolen goods is itself a crime. Antinori's insurance did not cover a loss this large, Corriere reported.

Stolen fine wine is also hard to sell at full price because collectors pay for a bottle's history. Last year, two people posing as event planners took six bottles of Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, valued at $38,000, from L'Auberge Provençale in Boyce, Virginia. Two bottles came back months later, including a $24,000 Romanée-Conti. «Nobody is going to pay $24,000 not knowing how the wine was kept,» co-owner Alain Borel said at the time.

The theft comes as winemakers struggle with falling demand among younger drinkers. For Antinori, the emotional damage outweighs the financial loss, Vivoli said, noting that some families have worked there for five generations. «It's a blow to the heart.»

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Derek Weston

Sports Writer

Derek Weston covers public affairs, politics, business, culture and daily news for Core Memo. The role focuses on verification, context, and clear explanations for readers.

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