A cellar worker selling Burgundy wines is believed to have stolen more than 7,000 bottles from his employers, worth a total of half a million euros, French judicial authorities said today. This theft is one of the biggest in the history of French wines.

The 56-year-old suspect was arrested and remanded in custody pending his trial in the summer, Dijon prosecutor Olivier Karakots said.

The man is believed to have stolen “thousands of bottles, over years” from the wineries where he worked in Beaune, in the heart of France’s famous wine region. About 7,000 bottles were found in his house.

According to the local newspaper Saône-et-Loire, which revealed the case, the 56-year-old was “caught” by security cameras stealing four bottles. After the lawsuit filed by his employer, he was arrested and his home was searched. Many wine cellars and thousands of bottles were found there, among which the owner of the wine shop recognized his own. The others came from other stores where the 56-year-old had worked for the past 15 years.

The suspect also covered the walls of the cellar at his mother’s house with wine bottles.

The price of each wine, such as the famous Vosne-Romanée, can exceed 1,000 euros. However, the perpetrator appears to have been collecting them for himself since there is no evidence so far that he sold even one bottle, the prosecutor said.

This theft is considered one of the biggest when it comes to wine. In 2019, hundreds of boxes of Petrus and Mouton-Rothschild wines and a bottle of the most expensive wine in the world, Romanée-Conti, were stolen from a house in Bordeaux. The total value of these wines also amounted to half a million euros. This is followed by the burglary, in 2007, at a warehouse in the suburbs of Bordeaux, where the perpetrators obtained wines worth 400,000 euros.