There's A New Method of Stealing Wine
Bottle by bottle, case by case, smash and grab, now...truck upon truck
It looks like there’s a new way to steal wine and spirits.
It always occurred to me that if you were going to pull some sort of wine heist, your best bet was to have a really good idea of what was valuable and what wasn’t. Then you find the place that displays these wines out in the open and take your shot. That would be the easiest way to go about it.
Some of you may have heard about a variation on this theme from a couple of months ago when some folks lowered themselves down through the ceiling of a California wine shop and lifted out upwards of $600,000 worth of wine. They knew what they were looking for. They took the good stuff: d’Yquem, First Growths, Sine Qua Non, other expensive bottles, and some tippy top-shelf whiskeys.
The thieves who pulled off this robbery likely were doing it for either themselves or another wine drinker or another retailer. It would be pretty hard to fence the stuff as the list of wines taken was quickly distributed to wine shops and auction houses across the country. I have no insight into which it was, but if I had to guess I’d go with a retailer.
Another more recent way to get your hands on wine, which I wrote about not too long ago, is the “Smash and Grab”. We saw a number of wine and spirit stores broken into, demolished, and cleaned out during the recent riots in Philadelphia. We saw the same in a number of other places during the riots of 2020.
Now there’s this:
Apparently, thieves backed up three tractor-trailers to the Republic-National Distributors warehouse in Gibsonton, Florida near Tampa, loaded up more than 4,200 cases, and took off. But not before being videoed by nearby surveillance cameras. More than $1.6 million in spirits and wine was taken.