An employee of a Burgundy wine house was sentenced Tuesday in Dijon to a one-year suspended prison sentence for the theft of thousands of bottles of wine worth more than €600,000, one of the largest of its kind. “It was more mechanical than anything else,” explained the 56-year-old defendant, who will also have to pay a €10,000 fine.
A maintenance worker successively in several houses in the prestigious wine region of Beaune (Côte d'Or), the fifty-year-old was unmasked by a surveillance camera which filmed him stealing four bottles in February 2024, as revealed by Le Bien Public.
1,300 bottles, 200 magnums…
The house of the man who was arrested had been searched. Investigators discovered several cellars, including one at his mother's house, and thousands of bottles accumulated over fifteen years. The values, sometimes of great wines, could exceed 1,000 euros.
In total, nearly 1,300 bottles and nearly 200 magnums of Burgundies were stolen between 2017 and 2024, for a total value of more than 640,000 euros. “I am being monitored medically. It appears that I am suffering from depression and that this would be a palliative,” said the frail-looking fifty-year-old.
Claiming not to have sold “any” of the stolen bottles, the defendant said he had “no idea” of the damage. “It was to have a nice cellar. To make it look nice,” he had already assured during his hearing by investigators. His bank accounts do not show any enrichment, the court acknowledged.
Denouncing a “compulsive thief”, the deputy prosecutor, Pascal Labonne-Collin, nevertheless stressed that the defendant knew that he was not stealing “poor money”, requesting an 18-month suspended sentence and a fine of 10,000 euros.
Nathalie Lepert-De Courville pleaded her client's “kleptomania,” which was recognized by a psychiatrist. “His wife will say that he is always afraid of missing out: he hoards,” she added. But “he has no notion of business,” according to her: “he buys wine to meet up with his friends, and doesn't even take the ones in his cellar.”
This theft ranks among the most important of its kind, on a par with the theft, in 2019, at the home of a Bordeaux broker, of a hundred cases of Petrus, Mouton-Rothschild, as well as a bottle of the very prestigious Romanée-Conti, a Burgundy that prides itself on being the most expensive wine in the world. The damage was half a million euros. This was followed by the burglary, in 2007, of a warehouse in the suburbs of Bordeaux for an amount estimated at 400,000 euros.
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