Stéphane Boujon (correpondent in Dijon) // Photo credit:
9:41 p.m., September 17, 2024
The events took place in Vosne-Romanée, in Côte-d’Or, on the night of Sunday to Monday last. A commando of criminals broke down the gates of a wine estate with a ram car to get their hands on bottles of fine wines. The damage amounts to nearly 100,000 euros.
500 or 600 euros for some bottles
And the thugs loaded the loot into their van in five minutes flat, with which they literally broke down the door to the bottle storage room, despite the anti-ram bar that was supposed to protect it.
Four hooded men, headlamps on their heads, who didn’t even glance at the other bottles that were stored. They were only interested in the grands crus. These wooden crates were about to leave for two large restaurants in the United States, explains Vincent Mongeard, owner of the Mongeard-Mugneret estate.
“They know how to read. They chose the best bottles, of course. They were vintages that went from 2009 to 2018. So, we had a whole assortment of old bottles that we had carefully kept, precisely for the great restoration. Unfortunately, we will not be able to replace these wines,” he laments.
Beautiful bottles, the most expensive of which, 2015 vintage Richebourgs, cost around 500 or 600 euros each. The total loss for these 318 stolen bottles is close to 100,000 euros. The police have opened an investigation. But the risk is that the grands crus are already far away, perhaps in Eastern countries, because, with their labels made for the United States, they are unsaleable in their current state in France.
