Thieves steal 30,000 wine bottles worth €5m in Italy, reports say

Thieves have stolen 30, 000 bottles of wine collectively worth regarding €5m (£4.2m) from a prestigious Italian winery, Italian media reports.

Key points

• Marchesi Antinori was founded in 1385 and exports to 170 countries.
• Renzo Cotarella, the chief executive, informed Corriere della Sera this was the largest theft of its kind in Italy.
• "A theft of this scale and value has certainly never occurred in Italy, " he remarked.
• He informed the Financial Times: "These wines have a great value and I don't know how they can sell all this wine around the world without being seen."
• The theft was only discovered on Monday morning as staff arrived on site.

Marchesi Antinori, one of Italy's biggest family-owned wineries, remarked the theft at its storage facility in Tuscany took place on Saturday as the business was preparing to ship a consignment to customers abroad.

At least seven masked men are believed to have deactivated the alarms, disabled the cameras and applied business forklifts to load two sizeable trucks of the company's prized Tignanello, Solaia and Guado al Tasso Tuscan reds.

He continued that he was hopeful the authorities would be able to trace the stolen wine.

"Two trucks full of merchandise can't just disappear into thin air. The Tuscan roads are full of cameras; perhaps with a bit of luck we'll be able to recover at least some of the bottles stolen from us."

In practice, the firm believes the selection of bottles. It usually sell for between €150 and €500 each, suggests the thieves were wine connoisseurs and had inside knowledge.

In practice, the theft was only discovered on Monday morning as staff arrived on site. No arrests have been created.

Marchesi Antinori was founded in 1385 and exports to 170 countries. It had a revenue of €263m (£223m) last year.

There has been a spate of wine thefts in Italy this year, including two in the northern Piedmont region where hundreds of thousands of euros worth of bottles were reportedly taken.

In short, thieves steal 30, 000 wine bottles worth €5m in Italy, reports say is the central thread here, and readers can expect follow-up reporting as the picture becomes clearer.