First they came for the cheese. Then they came for the olive oil and butter. Now, the thieves have come for the good wine, and we have to say that these recent heists are starting to feel personal if you’re the kind of person who enjoys a little treat. Last week, a winery in Tuscany revealed that thieves made off with around 30,000 bottles of some of Italy’s most prized wines in what the producer described as the country’s largest recorded wine theft. The coveted 2023 vintages, including Solaia, Tignanello and Guado al Tasso, are worth an estimated five million euros, or just under $8 million Canadian. “A theft of this size and value has never occurred in Italy,” Renzo Cotarella, chief executive of Marchesi Antinori, Italy’s largest family-owned winemaker, told the Associated Press on Friday. It’s also just the most recent. Last month, 3,000 bottles of Barolo were stolen in the northern Piedmont region, according to French news site Le Monde. In late June, thieves attacked the famous Banfi winery in Montalcino and seized 3,000 bottles of sparkling wine, an Italian news site noted. It’s not just an Italian problem either. Globally, some notable recent heists include the thief who made off with about 800 bottles from a California wine store in 2023, a couple who stole about $1.7 million worth of rare wine from a Michelin-starred restaurant in Spain in 2021, and criminals who stole 500 kilograms of white wine grapes (equivalent to about 350 bottles of wine) from a Quebec vineyard in 2020.Benoit Giroussens, vineyard manager at Vignoble et Cidrerie Coteau Rougemont in Quebec, is pictured in 2020 after thieves ripped grapes from the vines and stuffed them into garbage bags. (Sarah Leavitt/CBC) Large-scale muggings and robberies are increasing, said Rod Phillips, a history professor at Carleton University in Ottawa who specializes in the history of alcohol. Good wine has a large black market, Phillips said, and many people are willing to buy expensive wine at a lower price. “There are several channels to sell good wine and I think everyone is very receptive these days, now that everyone is under financial pressure,” Phillips told CBC News. It also packs a lot of value into a small amount of product, with a single box sometimes worth thousands of euros, said wine expert Natalie MacLean. It also doesn’t spoil, meaning thieves can sit there for years before selling it, and unlike a painting, a wine box is not unique. “I think it’s a trend,” MacLean told CBC News. “People are looking to profit and wine is a big target.” What happened in Italy? The most recent robbery targeted the Marchesi Antinori facility near Cortona, in the province of Arezzo, and appeared to have been planned down to the smallest detail, according to Italian news site Rai News. Seven thieves disabled the alarm system and surveillance cameras, then used the company’s own forklifts to load two trucks with wine and then fled into the night, Cotarella, the winery’s CEO, told the Associated Press. Depending on how they pack them, that’s about 2,500 cases of wine to lift and carry, Phillips said. “You don’t move that fast… and obviously it has to be very well planned,” he said. Police and Carabinieri officers are examining surveillance footage and other evidence, the Associated Press said. CBC News reached out to the winery, the local police department and the Carabinieri for more information and has yet to receive a response. A view shows the vineyards and exterior of the Marchesi Antinori winery in Bargino, near Florence, Italy, in this undated image. (Marchesi Antinori Press/Handout/Reuters) The stolen bottles were all from the 2023 vintage and typically sell for a retail price of between 150 and 500 euros each (between 240 and 800 Canadian dollars). Among them were some 10,000 bottles of Solaia, one of Antinori’s emblematic wines. Antinori makes only 60,000 to 70,000 bottles of Solaia a year, explained MacLean, the wine expert. That’s about one-sixth of a crop consumed in one night. “The loss of Solaia is staggering,” he said. The theft was discovered on October 5, but the company made it public on October 9 to avoid interfering with the investigation. “People in the warehouse were crying,” Cotarella told the Financial Review. “It’s not just the value of the wine, it’s something else. We can survive without this wine, but what makes me so sad is the fact that this could happen to us.” A Brief History of Recent Heists Until recently, most wine crimes generally involved fraud rather than theft, said Phillips, the historian. Counterfeit Canadian ice wines made and sold in China, for example, hurt sales in Ontario about 20 years ago. “These robberies are more of a recent phenomenon,” he said. Thieves don’t just have wine in their hands. In August, thieves made off with 40,000 pounds of Pabst Blue Ribbon and Old Milwaukee non-alcoholic beer in Southern California. Police estimated the stolen beer was worth almost C$100,000. There have also been a number of large food-related robberies recently, which some analysts have linked to rising food prices. Last year, Montreal police said more than $1 million worth of olive oil was stolen after a delivery involving two city transportation companies never reached its destination in Ontario. That year, Ontario police also charged six people in a series of butter and ghee thefts, resulting in losses of more than $60,000. SEE | BC Police Foiled Nearly $13,000 Cheese Heist:#TheMoment BC Police Foiled Nearly $13,000 Cheese HeistConst. Mansoor Sahak recounts the time North Vancouver RCMP stopped a man from stealing nearly $13,000 worth of cheese from a local Whole Foods. Also in 2025, 40,000 oysters, lobster worth C$568,000, and a cache of crab meat were stolen in separate incidents weeks apart in New England. Meanwhile, in Pennsylvania, someone stole 100,000 organic eggs valued at about C$57,000 from the back of a distribution trailer. Of course, the cheese world is still reeling after a 2024 UK cheese heist in which scammers made off with over £300,000 (or over $540,000 Cdn) worth of award-winning, cloth-bound cheddar cheese. The same year, BC RCMP revealed that they had recently thwarted an attempted cheese theft at a Whole Foods in North Vancouver. They had been patrolling on September 29, 2024, when they found a cart full of cheese outside the grocery store. One suspect fled on foot, leaving behind $12,800 worth of cheese. But Canada’s most famous food robbery is probably the famous maple syrup robbery of 2012, where thieves in Quebec stole more than $18 million worth of cheese.
