About 30,000 bottles of premium wine worth an estimated €5 million ($5.8 million) were stolen from Marchesi Antinori’s warehouse near Cortona, in Tuscany’s Arezzo province. The producer described the raid as Italy’s largest wine theft on record. The haul included sought-after 2023 wines, but reporting has not established who disabled the security system or whether the thieves had help from inside.
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How the raid unfolded
Reports describe at least seven masked thieves entering the storage facility and loading wine onto two trucks. They disabled the alarms and cameras, then used Antinori’s forklifts to move the cases. One account says the operation took about three hours.
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A report by Fortune added a significant detail: the alarms had been switched off from inside the building the day before the theft. That raises questions about the raid’s preparation, but the report does not identify who switched them off or prove an insider was involved.
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The wine was already prepared for shipment, and Antinori was getting a consignment ready for customers abroad. That may have made it easier to load the bottles quickly. But the available reporting does not establish that the shipment was unusually rare or that the timing proves inside knowledge.
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Which wines were stolen—and what are they worth?
The stolen labels included Tignanello, Solaia and Guado al Tasso. Lorenzo Vivoli, a spokesperson for Antinori, told Fortune that the haul included roughly 10,000 bottles of each, all from the 2023 vintage.
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Fortune cited average U.S. retail prices of about $430 for Solaia, $200 for Tignanello and $190 for Guado al Tasso. Those are reported retail estimates, not a confirmed resale value for the stolen bottles. Antinori put its loss at about €5 million for European markets.
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The cited reports do not provide reliable production volumes for these wines. Nor do they establish what share of the loss insurance will cover: Fortune reported that Antinori’s insurance did not cover a loss of this size, but the supplied account gives no further policy details.
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When was the theft discovered and announced?
Antinori staff discovered the theft on Monday morning, October 5, according to reporting on the incident. The company made the loss public on Friday, October 9. The available reports do not explain why the announcement came several days after the discovery.
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Coverage differs on the precise overnight timing. Some accounts describe a Saturday-night raid, while others place it on Sunday or across the October 3–4 weekend. The main details of the theft are consistent, but the exact chronology is not uniform across reports.
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Customer warning and possible links to other thefts
Antinori warned customers to be cautious about offers outside official sales channels as it hoped to recover the wine. The family winery traces its origins to 1385 and exports to 170 countries.
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Reports also mention other wine thefts, including incidents involving Banfi and Conterno Fantino. That context alone does not show the same people were responsible; the available reporting does not establish a link between those cases and the Antinori raid.
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The central facts are clear: a large quantity of valuable wine was taken from a warehouse after security systems were disabled. The identities of the thieves, who switched off the alarms, the reason for the delay in announcing the theft and the prospect of recovering the bottles remain unresolved in the reporting cited here.