
More than 80 bottles of rare wine disappeared from the cellar of La Tour d’Argent, a renowned Paris restaurant, according to a complaint filed last week that left investigators scrambling to find who was responsible.
The stolen wine was worth approximately 1.5 million euros ($1.6 million), the Paris prosecutor’s spokeswoman said in a statement. The third division of the Paris Judicial Police is supervising the investigation.
A sommelier became aware of the theft of the 83 bottles, which could have taken place between 2020 and 2024, during a routine inventory check of the approximately 300,000 bottles of wine that were in the restaurant’s cellar. Le Parisien reported. There was no evidence of forced entry at the 442-year-old restaurant, the newspaper reported, adding that the establishment was closed for renovations between spring 2022 and fall 2023.
Wine thefts of this scale are unusual, but not unheard of. In 2011, thieves disabled security alarms and security cameras while stealing 400 cases of wine worth £1 million (about $1.6 million at the time) from a London warehouse. A decade later, the owners of a hotel and restaurant in Cáceres, Spain, reported that 45 bottles of wine worth 1.6 million euros (about $1.9 million in 2021) disappeared from their cellar, including one bottle valued at 350,000 euros (around $414,000 at the time). time). Last year, a Spanish court sentenced a former Mexican beauty queen and her partner to four and a half years in prison for the robbery. according to El País.
The wine stolen from La Tour d’Argent included bottles from Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, one of the most expensive wine estates in the world, Le Parisien reported.
A spokeswoman for La Tour d’Argent declined to comment on the theft.
The first version of La Tour d’Argent was founded in 1582. Established as an inn serving the lords of King Henry III, it became known as the Hostellerie de la Tour d’Argent, or silver tower, in honor of an adjacent castle that was built of silver stone.
King Henry IV, who ascended the throne in 1589 following the assassination of Henry III, became a regular customer of the restaurant. He inaugurated the use of the fork, a little-known utensil in France at that time, during a dinner there, according to his account. the restaurant’s website.
On July 14, 1789, the restaurant was raided by revolutionaries who had attacked the Bastille, across the Seine, and had confused the restaurant’s coat of arms with that of the royal family.
In 1911, the current owner’s grandfather, André Terrail, bought the restaurant. Shortly after, La Tour d’Argent closed for several years while he fought in World War I and then reopened when he returned. The restaurant remained open during World War II, but the owners hid their most prized bottles of wine behind a brick wall that was designed to blend in with other walls, out of sight of the many German customers who frequented the restaurant after that the Nazis invaded France.
In 2010, Mr. Terrail, the third generation of the family owner The Tour d’Argent, auctioned 18,000 bottles of wines and spirits from the winery. The sale added more than 1.5 million euros (about $1.6 million) to the restaurant’s bottom line.