SIP 'N' SEIZE

How did the wine heist become the crime du jour?

- GABE ULLA

Minutes after midnight on June 30, 2023, a man wearing a black hoodie and a red baseball cap exited a white pickup truck that had just pulled into the parking lot of Lincoln Fine Wines in Venice, California. He climbed to the top of the building, cut a five-by-three-foot hole in the roof, and rappelled directly into the retailer’s rare wines room. Avoiding alarm sensors but not video cameras, which recorded his movements, he then proceeded to spend hours methodically pillaging the store’s most coveted stock—Petrus, Latour, an enormous 15-liter nebuchadnezzar of Billecart-Salmon—pausing occasionally to lift his phone to his ear. By the time he was gone with his accomplices, the rear of the truck was filled with $600,000 worth of stolen wine.

A few months earlier, in March, authorities in Spain brought to trial a former Mexican beauty pageant contestant two years after she had checked into a hotel in Cáceres with a fake Swiss passport and plans to meet a friend for dinner at the property’s Michelin-starred restaurant. After the 14-course meal, the pair received a private tour of the cellar. Hours later, the authorities allege, the two checked out of the hotel with $1.7 million worth of stolen wine, including a bottle of 1806 Château d’Yquem that has yet to be recovered. The couple, who pleaded not guilty, were convicted and sentenced to four years and ordered to pay $800,000 to the insurance company.

Welcome to an increasingly popular illicit corner of the wine world, where enterprising individuals can make the kind of killing once reserved for jewel or art thieves. The aforementioned incidents represent only a fraction of the ongoing investigations, controversies, and criminal and civil cases underway at every level of the business, around the globe, in cases of theft, forgery, and fraud.