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Thieves raided the wine cellar of Michelin starred Formel B restaurant in Copenhagen and made off with specific high-value bottles.
When owners Rune Jochumsen and Kristian Arpe-Moller opened their restaurant on Monday morning they were greeted with a giant hole in their cellar wall.
Thieves had entered the cellar through a neighboring shop, not stealing anything from there, targeting specifically Formal B’s wine cellar.
About 60 bottles were initially noted as missing, high-value, rare vintages mainly bottles of Romanee-Conti from France's Burgundy region - one of the world's most expensive wines - at upwards of 1.5 million Danish kroner (€200,000).
It seems this was no ordinary robbery, as the thieves knew exactly what they were looking for and took no more than the exact bottles they were after. It was, most likely a professional job, made to order for a private collector.
"The thieves specifically went after our rare wines with very high market value," the owners wrote on their Facebook page.
These rare wine robberies are very much like art theft. Just as famous paintings are near impossible to sell on the black market, so too are rare wines. Most likely these bottles were targeted to complete the collection of some unscrupulous wine buff.
"It is a close to irreplaceable collection of wines we have spent many years building, that has disappeared in a single night," the owners said in the post, encouraging followers to share their message in the hopes of "miraculously" recovering the wines.
Wine theft is not a rare occurrence. Last year €400,000 worth of wine from top Bordeaux estates Lafite Rothschild, Latour and Petrus were stolen from the cellar of two Michelin star restaurant Maison Rostang in Paris.
Chef Thomas Keller’s French Laundry was raided in 2014 with thieves making off with $300,000 wine from his cellar. The expensive wine was later located in a private wine cellar in North Carolina and returned undamaged to the American chef.
