The 5 million wine heist.
Tuscany · Crime & Consequence
The Night the Trucks Left Cortona
In a single Saturday night, a professional gang stripped Marchesi Antinori's warehouse of 30,000 bottles of Italy's most coveted wine — and the industry is now asking what it will take to protect the cellar of the future.
Somewhere on the night of Saturday, October 3, seven masked men walked into one of the most storied wine companies on earth and left with its crown jewels. The target was a Marchesi Antinori storage facility outside Cortona, in the province of Arezzo — and by the time the sun came up over Tuscany, two large trucks had disappeared into the dark carrying around 30,000 bottles of Solaia, Tignanello and Guado al Tasso from the 2023 vintage, worth roughly €5 million. Italy's biggest family-owned winery, founded in 1385 and run by the Antinori family for 26 generations, had just been hit by what its chief executive called the largest wine theft in the country's history.
A job with military precision
The gang knew exactly what it was doing. Security footage shows at least seven masked men who disabled the facility's alarm system and put its surveillance cameras out of commission before entering. They didn't bring their own equipment, either — they used the company's own forklifts to load two trucks with wine, fleeing into the night. The timing was no accident: the theft came as Antinori was preparing to ship a consignment to customers abroad, meaning the warehouse was stocked deep with exactly the bottles collectors covet most.
The haul was staggering in its focus. Among the 30,000 bottles were some 10,000 bottles of Solaia, one of Antinori's flagship wines, from what chief executive Renzo Cotarella described as an exceptional year. All of the stolen bottles were from the 2023 vintage and typically retail for between €150 and €500 each — though the street value of a suddenly scarce icon wine rarely stays at retail for long.
The Cortona heist — the numbers
"A very well-prepared gang"
Antinori's leadership did not mince words. "It is certainly a very well-prepared gang," Cotarella told Corriere della Sera, adding that it may be the same group that has targeted other Italian wineries in recent months — in July, 3,300 bottles were stolen from the renowned producer Castello Banfi. "A theft of this size and value has certainly never occurred in Italy." The heist was discovered on Monday morning, when employees arrived to find the wine gone; the company made it public on Friday, it said, to avoid interfering with the investigation.
Two trucks full of merchandise can't just disappear into thin air. We still hope to recover the wine.Renzo Cotarella, Chief Executive, Marchesi Antinori
Warning the world
Antinori is not waiting quietly for the police. The company — which exports to 170 countries and posted revenue of €263 million last year — is alerting customers worldwide to be wary of offers outside official sales channels. The logic is both defensive and offensive: protecting the brand's allocation system while making the stolen wine radioactive. A container of 2023 Solaia surfacing through a back channel is now, in effect, a confession.
No arrests have been made. The question hanging over Cortona is larger than one night's theft: if seven men with two trucks can empty the cellar of a 640-year-old dynasty in a single night, what does security look like for the next generation of great wines — and how much of the cost of answering that will end up, as it always does, in the price of the bottle?
