More than 80 bottles of rare wine disappeared from the cellar of La Tour d’Argent, a famous restaurant in Paris, according to a complaint filed last week, leaving investigators scrambling to find who was responsible.
The value of the stolen wine is estimated at 1.5 million euros ($1.6 million), a spokeswoman for the Paris prosecutor’s office said in a statement. The third division of the Paris Judicial Police is overseeing the investigation.
A sommelier noticed 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 in the restaurant’s cellar, Le Parisien reported. There was no evidence of forced entry into the 442-year-old restaurant, the newspaper said, adding that the facility was closed for renovations between spring 2022 and fall 2023.
Wine thefts of this scale are unusual, but not unheard of. In 2011, robbers disabled security alarms and security cameras as they stole 400 cases of wine worth 1 million British pounds (about $1.6 million at the time) from a warehouse in London. 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 dollars) disappeared from their cellar, including a bottle worth 350,000 euros (about 414,000 dollars over time). A court in Spain last year sentenced a former Mexican beauty queen and her partner to four and a half years in prison for the theft, 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 iteration of La Tour d’Argent was established in 1582. Founded as an inn serving the lords of King Henry III, it became known as the Hostellerie de la Tour d’Argent, or silver tower, after an adjacent castle built by silver stone.
King Henry IV, who ascended the throne in 1589 after the assassination of Henry III, became a regular at the restaurant. He pioneered the use of the fork, a little-known utensil in France at the time, at a dinner there, according to the restaurant’s website.
On July 14, 1789, the restaurant was stormed by revolutionaries who had attacked the Bastille across the Seine and had mistaken the restaurant’s coat of arms for that of the royal family.
In 1911, the grandfather of the current owner, André Terrail, bought the restaurant. Shortly thereafter, La Tour d’Argent was closed for several years while he fought in World War I, then reopened when he returned. The restaurant remained open during World War II, but the owners hid the most valuable bottles of wine behind a brick wall designed to blend in with other walls, away from the many German patrons who frequented the restaurant after Nazi invasion of France.
In 2010, Mr. Terrail, the third generation of the family that owns La Tour d’Argent, was auctioning off 18,000 bottles of wine and spirits from the cellar. The sale added more than 1.5 million euros (about $1.6 million) to the restaurant’s bottom line.
