Thieves steal 30,000 wine bottles worth €5m in Italy

Thieves have stolen 30,000 bottles of wine collectively worth about €5m (£4.2m) from a prestigious Italian winery, Italian media reports.

Marchesi Antinori, one of Italy's biggest family-owned wineries, said the theft at its storage facility in Tuscany took place on Saturday as the company was preparing to ship a consignment to customers abroad.

At least seven masked men are believed to have deactivated the alarms, disabled the cameras and used company forklifts to load two large trucks of the company's prized Tignanello, Solaia and Guado al Tasso Tuscan reds.

Renzo Cotarella, the chief executive, told Corriere della Sera this was the largest theft of its kind in Italy.

"A theft of this scale and value has certainly never occurred in Italy," he said.

He added that he was hopeful the authorities would be able to trace the stolen wine.

"Two trucks full of merchandise can't just disappear into thin air. The Tuscan roads are full of cameras; perhaps with a bit of luck we'll be able to recover at least some of the bottles stolen from us."

He told the Financial Times: "These wines have a great value and I don't know how they can sell all this wine around the world without being seen."

The company believes the selection of bottles, which usually sell for between €150 and €500 each, suggests the thieves were wine connoisseurs and had inside knowledge.

The theft was only discovered on Monday morning as staff arrived on site. No arrests have been made.

Marchesi Antinori was founded in 1385 and exports to 170 countries. It had a revenue of €263m (£223m) last year.

There has been a spate of wine thefts in Italy this year, including two in the northern Piedmont region where hundreds of thousands of euros worth of bottles were reportedly taken.