Masked thieves stole about 30,000 bottles of wine from Marchesi Antinori's warehouse in Cortona, Tuscany, in a robbery that took place over a Saturday night and lasted roughly three hours. The haul, worth more than $8 million, is believed to be the largest wine theft ever recorded.
The theft matters to wine drinkers and collectors because it involves some of Italy's most sought-after bottles, and because the scale of the crime raises questions about how such a large shipment could vanish without anyone noticing beforehand. For American buyers, it also comes with a warning: stolen bottles may try to enter the market through unofficial channels.
According to Lorenzo Vivoli, who works in Antinori's communications office, the thieves arrived with two trucks and took bottles that were already packed for export. The warehouse's alarms had been switched off from inside the building the day before the heist, meaning no alarms sounded during the robbery. "It's as if they already knew everything," Vivoli told Fortune.
Antinori CEO Renzo Cotarella called it "a theft of unprecedented scale for the wine industry in Italy, carried out by a group that was clearly highly organized and well prepared."
The stolen wine includes about 10,000 bottles each of Tignanello, Solaia and Guado al Tasso, all from the 2023 vintage. Based on average U.S. retail prices, Fortune estimated the loss at about $8.2 million, with Solaia priced around $430 a bottle, Tignanello around $200 and Guado al Tasso around $190. Antinori put the loss at about 5 million euros for European markets. By either figure, the theft surpasses any previous wine or spirits heist on record. The prior Italian record, reported by Corriere della Sera, was a 750,000 euro theft in Cervia in 2017. A Drinks Business ranking of major heists listed a $2.7 million scheme at Legend Cellars in Irvine, California, in 2015 as the costliest before now.
Antinori says it does not yet know how the alarms were disabled. Police are investigating, but no suspects have been named and no arrests have been made. The company has surveillance footage but says police have asked it not to be released while the investigation continues.
A history of counterfeiting
Antinori's top wines have been targeted by counterfeiters before. In 2019, Italian police arrested three people connected to a scheme that sold at least 11,000 fake bottles of Tignanello across Italy, Germany and Belgium, labeled with 2009, 2010 and 2011 vintages but filled with low-quality wine. That case traced back to a print shop in Pistoia that received an order for more than 4,000 fake Tignanello labels from someone calling himself "Mr. Rossi," who claimed to represent the company. The counterfeit labels misspelled the Italian word for altitude. Separately, more than 54,000 counterfeit bottles bearing the names of top Italian wineries, including Antinori, were sold into Switzerland between 2016 and 2018.
To fight counterfeiting, Antinori has added security features to its bottles since the 2013 vintage, including an embossed logo, an embossed Tignanello name, and since 2016, a scannable label that lets buyers verify authenticity by phone. But Vivoli said those features will not help recover the stolen bottles. "They don't help us find the stolen bottles," he said.
Selling stolen wine is hard
Antinori is hoping the sheer volume of stolen wine makes it difficult to resell. "A quantity of around 30,000 bottles is difficult to move and put back on the market without leaving a trace," Cotarella said. Vivoli added that because the three wines are distributed in small allocations, a sudden large supply would draw attention. "These 30,000 bottles won't vanish into thin air," he said. "It will be very hard for them."
The company is alerting partners and customers across the 170 countries it exports to, warning them against buying wine offered outside official channels. The U.S. is Antinori's largest market outside Italy, though Italian wine exports there have already suffered, falling 17% in value during the first year after new tariffs took effect, a loss of more than 340 million euros, according to the trade group Unione Italiana Vini. Corriere della Sera reported that Antinori's insurance does not cover a loss of this size.
Collectors tend to be wary of wine with unclear origins. In a separate case last year, two people posing as event planners stole six bottles of Domaine de la Romanée-Conti worth $38,000 from L'Auberge Provençale in Boyce, Virginia, The Washington Post reported. Two bottles were later returned, including one worth $24,000. Co-owner Alain Borel said at the time that no buyer would pay that price without knowing how the wine had been stored.
The theft lands at a difficult moment for winemakers already facing falling demand among younger drinkers. Vivoli said the emotional toll on Antinori outweighs the financial loss, noting that some employees' families have worked for the company for five generations. "It's a blow to the heart," he said.
As police continue their investigation, no timeline has been given for when the case might be resolved or the wine recovered.
Before this, we covered: How Much to Spend on a Good Bottle of Red Wine in 2026
