First Barolo, now the prestigious Marchesi Antinori. The theft of Italian wine knows no crisis

Two weeks ago, whilst reporting on the wine thefts from the Banfi and Conterno Fantino cellars, we wrote that the perfect heist is the one that ends up on the table. Three thousand bottles in Strevi, three thousand in Monforte d’Alba, stolen using the companies’ own forklift trucks and vans. It already seemed like a series of incidents, but perhaps it was just a dress rehearsal. During the night between last Sunday and Monday, a gang of at least seven people broke into the Marchesi Antinori premises in Cortona (province of Arezzo). They disabled the alarm and CCTV cameras and made off with two lorries and around thirty thousand bottles from the 2023 vintage, with an estimated value of five million euros.

To load the goods, the thieves used the winery’s forklift trucks once again. It now seems to be standard procedure: the thieves provide the manpower, whilst the owner provides the vehicles. Renzo Cotarella, managing director of Antinori, suspects that the same gang is behind this as the one that has targeted other Italian wineries in recent months.

Among the stolen goods are around ten thousand bottles of Solaia, out of an annual production of between sixty and seventy thousand: one sixth of the harvest vanished overnight. In a year in which Italian wine is struggling to find buyers, at least one distribution channel seems immune to the crisis.