Fine wine cellars at Paris restaurants have become a target for thieves.
Burglars used the cover of darkness to target the Paris restaurant wine cellar, escaping with a loot valued at €60,000 (£50,000).
Their haul contained several grand cru wines that sell for more than €2,000 per bottle.
French authorities did not name the restaurant that was targeted, but Le Parisien newspaper described it as ‘a small restaurant with a sober frontage and a warm interior’.
The establishment has just a dozen tables, arranged in a dining room that has been ‘decorated with care and in a cozy atmosphere’.
Burglars got into the restaurant at night and forced access to the cellar, before swiping more than 750 bottles of fine wine.
It is just the latest in a long line of fine wine thefts to rock the French capital in recent months.
The most notable theft occurred at celebrated Parisian restaurant La Tour d’Argent, which discovered that wine worth more than £1.25 m had disappeared from the cellar.
Jérôme Baudouin, the editor-in-chief of Paris-based magazine La Revue du vin de France, told local reporters that it has been a ‘bad vintage’ for fine wine thefts.
He said: ‘For the last five or six years, there has been an increase in thefts. The price of wine, particularly Burgundy, has risen considerably, and that attracts criminals.’
According to Baudouin, the average price of a bottle of Burgundy premier cru in the domestic market has risen from €50 to €400 over the
