A Heist of Grape Audacity

A rare $400,000 Château d’Yquem Sauternes and 44 other bottles of wine have been stolen from the cellar of the Atrio boutique hotel in western Spain. The suspects, a couple in their 40s, checked in—she, Swiss passport; he, perfect English—and, following an expensive tasting-menu dinner at the hotel’s two-Michelin-starred restaurant, requested and were given a tour of the 40,000-bottle wine cellar. At 1:30 A.M. they ordered a room-service salad and, presumably while that was being prepared by the only remaining member of the kitchen staff, broke into the cellar. By early the next morning they, and those 45 bottles of wine, had checked out.

“They were professionals, they knew exactly what they were doing,” said Atrio’s co-owner José Polo. According to The Times of London, the 1806 Yquem is “so famous that Polo said it would be impossible to sell without alerting the authorities, fuelling his conviction that the robbery was commissioned by a wealthy private collector.”