Greater than 80 bottles of uncommon wine disappeared from the cellar of La Tour d’Argent, a famend restaurant in Paris, in keeping with a grievance filed final week that left investigators scrambling to seek out who was accountable.
The stolen wine was value an estimated 1.5 million euros ($1.6 million), the Paris prosecutor’s spokeswoman mentioned in an announcement. The third division of the Paris Judicial Police is overseeing the investigation.
A sommelier seen the theft of the 83 bottles, which might have taken place between 2020 and 2024, throughout a routine stock verify of the roughly 300,000 bottles of wine within the restaurant’s cellar, Le Parisien reported. There was no proof of pressured entry into the 442-year-old restaurant, the newspaper reported, including that the institution was closed for renovation between the spring of 2022 and the autumn of 2023.
Wine thefts of this scale are uncommon, however not unheard-of. In 2011, robbers disabled safety alarms and safety cameras as they stole 400 instances of wine value 1 million British kilos (about $1.6 million on the time) from a London warehouse. A decade later, the homeowners of a resort and restaurant in Cáceres, Spain, reported that 45 bottles of wine value 1.6 million euros (about $1.9 million in 2021) went lacking from their cellar, together with a bottle value 350,000 euros (about $414,000 on the time). A court docket in Spain final 12 months sentenced a former Mexican magnificence queen and her companion to 4 and a half years in jail for the theft, according to El PaĂs.
The wine stolen from La Tour d’Argent included bottles from Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, one of the crucial costly wine estates on this planet, Le Parisien reported.
A spokeswoman for La Tour d’Argent declined to touch upon the theft.
The primary iteration of La Tour d’Argent was based in 1582. Established as an inn that served the lords of King Henry III, it grew to become often called the Hostellerie de la Tour d’Argent, or silver tower, after an adjoining château that was constructed of silvery stone.
King Henry IV, who ascended the throne in 1589 after the homicide of Henry III, grew to become an everyday. He inaugurated using the fork, somewhat identified utensil in France on the time, over a dinner there, in keeping with the restaurant’s website.
On July 14, 1789, the restaurant was stormed by revolutionaries who had attacked the Bastille on the opposite aspect of the Seine and had mistaken the restaurant’s coat of arms for that of the royal household.
In 1911, the grandfather of the present proprietor, André Terrail, bought the restaurant. Shortly after, La Tour d’Argent closed for a number of years whereas he fought in World Warfare I, then was reopened when he returned. The restaurant stayed open throughout World Warfare II, however the homeowners hid their most prized wine bottles behind a brick wall that was designed to mix in with different partitions, out of sight from the numerous German patrons who frequented the restaurant after the Nazis invaded France.
In 2010, Mr. Terrail, the third technology of the household that has owned La Tour d’Argent, auctioned off 18,000 bottles of wine and spirits from the cellar. The sale added greater than 1.5 million euros (about $1.6 million) to the restaurant’s backside line.
