The great Paris wine heist

Eighty-three bottles of rare wine worth €1.5 million have disappeared from the famous La Tour d’Argent restaurant in Paris.

Police were called in after a sommelier from the Michelin-starred restaurant discovered the bottles were missing during a recent inventory, suggesting they must have been taken at some time since 2020, the last time they were checked.

The restaurant on the banks of the Seine with its impressive views of Notre Dame and a documented history dating back to 1582 is as famed for its wines as well as its food.

Some of the missing 83 bottles came from the Domaine de la Romanee-Conti estate in Burgundy which produces some of the world’s most expensive wines, with single bottles selling for five-figure sums. A bottle of 1945 Romanée-Conti was sold for €482,000 in 2018, making it the most expensive bottle ever sold.

A spokeswoman for La Tour d’Argent declined to comment on the theft but according to reports in the French media, investigators have found no signs of a forced entry.

Sources close to the case revealed that police suspect that the robbery could have been carried out between spring the spring of 2022 and the autumn of 2023 when La Tour d’Argent was closed for renovations.

With a cellar whose 300,000 bottles are worth an estimated €27.8 million, La Tour d’Argent has what is believed to be the largest restaurant wine store in Paris.  In 2010, the restaurant’s owner Andre Terrail auctioned off 18,000 bottles of wine and spirits, fetching €1.5 million.

A wine expert quoted by the BBC pointed out that all of the missing bottles were numbered and it would be difficult for a thief to sell them without drawing unwelcome attention.