Fine wine cellars at Paris restaurants have become a target for thieves.
Burglars used the cover of darkness to target the Paris restaurant wine cellar, escaping with a loot valued at €60,000 (£50,000).
Their haul contained several grand cru wines that sell for more than €2,000 per bottle.
French authorities did not name the restaurant that was targeted, but Le Parisien newspaper described it as ‘a small restaurant with a sober frontage and a warm interior’.
The establishment has just a dozen tables, arranged in a dining room that has been ‘decorated with care and in a cozy atmosphere’.
Burglars got into the restaurant at night and forced access to the cellar, before swiping more than 750 bottles of fine wine.
It is just the latest in a long line of fine wine thefts to rock the French capital in recent months.
The most notable theft occurred at celebrated Parisian restaurant La Tour d’Argent, which discovered that wine worth more than £1.25 m had disappeared from the cellar.
Jérôme Baudouin, the editor-in-chief of Paris-based magazine La Revue du vin de France, told local reporters that it has been a ‘bad vintage’ for fine wine thefts.
He said: ‘For the last five or six years, there has been an increase in thefts. The price of wine, particularly Burgundy, has risen considerably, and that attracts criminals.’
According to Baudouin, the average price of a bottle of Burgundy premier cru in the domestic market has risen from €50 to €400 over the past decade.
He said that this makes it attractive for thieves, who target small restaurants, raid the cellars, load 20 to 30 cases into the boot of a car and tear off into the Paris night with their loot.
While some expert thieves target restaurants in Paris, others have gone direct to the source and stolen grapes from vines while the vineyard owners are asleep.
Restaurant wine cellars in other European countries have also been targeted in the past few years. In Spain, a couple were jailed last year for stealing fine wines in rucksacks – including a bottle of Chateau d’Yquem 1806 – from Michelin-starred Atrio.
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