Thieves Steal Over $5 Million in Wine From Marchesi Antinori

What may be the biggest wine heist in Italian—or world—history just happened on Marchesi Antinori’s doorstep.

A group of thieves has plundered over $5.5 million (5 million euros) worth of wine from the prestigious winery in Tuscany, adding up to some 300,000 bottles, last weekend, The Guardian reported. The brazen robbery targeted a historic family-run brand that has been making wine for 640 years and is currently run by its 26^th and 27^th generations.

On Saturday, around seven masked robbers shut off the alarms and surveillance cameras surrounding one of Marchesi Antinori’s cellars in Cortona. Then, they managed to break in and fill two trucks with thousands and thousands of wine bottles, using the company’s forklifts to do so. The bottles were being prepped for a shipment abroad, and employees only found the wine was missing upon their arrival on Monday morning, according to the publication.

Many of the wines that were nabbed are beloved by the wine community the world over, such as Tignanello, one of the first Super Tuscans, a red wine that is blended entirely without white grapes. Other coveted wines included Solaia, 3,000 bottles of Barolo Ginestra (including magnums), and Guado al Tasso, all from the 2023 vintage and priced between about $134 and $450 (120 euros and 400 euros), The Guardian reported.

Renzo Cotarella, Marchesi Antinori’s chief executive, told the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera that the group was “very prepared,” though he still hopeful that the shipments would be discovered.
“Two trucks full of merchandise can’t just disappear into thin air,” he said. “The Tuscan roads are full of cameras—perhaps with a bit of luck we’ll be able to recover at least some of the bottles stolen from us.”

Those bottles help Marchesi Antinori, founded in 1385, earn around $300 million (265 million euros) in annual revenue, with its wines sent to 170 countries across the globe, per CNN. The heist, which is follows behind a series of robberies at wineries in Italy as of late, is even more shocking when considering the prestige of Marchesi Antinori—and the amount of wine that was stolen. Luckily, that may help in finding the stolen bottles.

“These wines have a great value, and I don’t know how they can sell all this wine around the world without being seen,” Cotarella told the Financial Times.