Exclusive: The alarms in wine’s biggest heist were switched off from inside before masked thieves took off with 30,000 bottles worth over $8 million

Masked thieves needed about three hours on a Saturday night to empty Marchesi Antinori’s warehouse in Cortona, Tuscany, of about 30,000 bottles of some of Italy’s most collected wine.

And they didn’t have to worry about tripping some alarms: they never went off.

The day before the heist, the alarms had been switched off from inside the building, Lorenzo Vivoli, who works in Antinori’s communications office, told Fortune .

“It’s as if they already knew everything,” Vivoli said in Italian.

The thieves arrived with two trucks, and the bottles were ripe for the taking as they were already packed and waiting to get shipped to Antinori’s export markets.

“It’s the biggest theft in the history of wine,” Vivoli said.

“There’s never been anything this big.” “This is a theft of unprecedented scale for the wine industry in Italy, carried out by a group that was clearly highly organized and well prepared,” Antinori CEO Renzo Cotarella said.

The crew took roughly 10,000 bottles each of Tignanello, Solaia and Guado al Tasso, all from the 2023 vintage, Vivoli said.

At average U.S. retail prices of about $430 a bottle for Solaia, $200 for Tignanello and $190 for Guado al Tasso, the stolen wine is worth about $8.2 million.

For European markets, Antinori put its loss at about €5 million.

Marchesi Antinori Either figure would make it the most valuable single wine or spirits theft on record.

The previous Italian record, according to Corriere della Sera , was a 2017 theft in Cervia worth €750,000.

Meanwhile, the costliest case on a Drinks Business list of the most valuable heists was a $2.7 million scheme at Legend Cellars in Irvine, Calif., in 2015.

Antinori doesn’t know how the alarms were disabled, Vivoli said, and a police probe is ongoing.