French Thieves Steal $675K Of Wine, Toss Bottles At Cops
"Hugo," he says, cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth, "I'm trying to get the group back together for one last job. It's the big one. $675,000 worth of wine, and it's worth the risk. We can retire once we get rid of it. You in?"
This is how I imagine the following story started, because it's got intrigue and action in it, at least as reported by Food & Wine. Let's travel to Burgundy to kick off the heist, at The Domaine de Rymska Saint-Jean-de-Trézy, a luxury hotel known for its extensive collection of old fermented grape juice. In fact, it's a big draw, because if you're in Burgundy, why wouldn't you want to have a fancy glass of wine with your dinner?
On Monday, a burglar, or possibly group of burglars, burgled the the hotel's wine cellar and jacked around $245,000 worth of wine before they tripped any alarms. Whether or not any of them were wearing catsuits is not yet known at this time. This is already, in my mind, a pretty good haul. But, as you may have suspected, this isn't the end of the story.
In the wee hours of the next morning, the hotel was burgled again, maybe by the same crew, who bashed open the door to the wine cellar and ran off with a whopping $430,000 in grand cru Burgundies, aka "The Good Shit." The hotel owner heard the commotion and got to his car as the perps took off and started on the wild goose chase. During the pursuit, he managed to get a hold of the police, who jumped in on the rundown.
When the thieves saw the cops, in a brazen act of "fuck you," they did what any self-respecting group of bandits would do, which is to say they started chucking wine bottles at the windshields of the cop cars. Ballsy move, boys. But due to the hectic physics of it all, none of their defensive attacks landed.
All good chases come to an end, however, and the thieves crashed their van on the A6 Autoroute du Soleil, which is around 22 miles outside Lyon. They then took off on foot sans loot, and holy shit, they actually got away. According to The Guardian, so far none of the three suspects have been caught. So if you live near Lyon and see someone peddling some nice Burgundy at a suspiciously low cost, heads up, that vin in your hands might be hot.