One of the world’s finest wine cellars has been looted to order, with a €350,000 bottle of sauternes dessert wine among the haul.
“They were professionals, they knew exactly what they were doing,” said José Polo, co-owner of Atrio, a renowned boutique hotel and two-Michelin-starred restaurant in Caceres, in the Extremadura region of western Spain, where the wines were stored.
The bottle of 1806 Château d’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.
The suspected thieves posed as a holidaying couple in their forties. The woman arrived first at the hotel, checking in with a Swiss passport and carrying only a backpack but apparently wearing a wig as a disguise, according to a staff member. She was later joined by a man who spoke flawless English.
The couple had dinner, which costs €700 for the tasting menu, and a room for the night. After they finished, the couple requested a visit to the restaurant’s wine cellar, which contains 40,000 bottles of mostly French vintage from the most prestigious vineyards.
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After retiring to their room on Wednesday night, the couple requested more food at 1.30am. The hotel’s sole overnight staff member offered to prepare a salad, and this distraction appears to have been the opportunity for the thieves to return to the wine cellar and steal 45 of its most valuable bottles, among them the famous Yquem. They were also cool enough to add a request for a dessert to their room service order, presumably to buy more time to complete the transfer of bottles from the cellar to their room.
The cellar is protected by doors with electronic code locks, and neither was forced, suggesting sophisticated equipment may have been used, Polo told El País. The couple then checked out three and a half hours later, at 5.30am, departing on foot with their haul, which included at least six other 19th-century bottles from the exclusive Romanée-Conti winemaker in France’s Burgundy region, stashed inside luggage. The missing bottles weren’t detected until 1.30pm. Police are now examining security camera footage to try to identify the pair.
In an open letter Polo and his co-owner Toño Pérez wrote: “We feel an immense sadness today. These 45 bottles were very special and have been bought over the past decades with great effort. What pains us most is the loss of Château d’Yquem.”