An employee of a Burgundy wine company has been given a one-year suspended prison sentence in Dijon for stealing thousands of bottles of wine worth more than €600,000. The man's lawyer said her client suffered from "kleptomania" and had not made any money from the theft.
The maintenance worker with several vineyards in the prestigious Beaune wine producing region was unmasked by a surveillance camera that filmed him stealing four bottles in February 2024.
The man's house was searched when he was arrested.
Investigators discovered several cellars, including one at his mother's house, and thousands of bottles accumulated over a period of 15 years.
The value of the bottles – some of which were grands crus – may exceed over €1,000 each.
According to the 56-year-old defendant, who will also have to pay a €10,000 fine: "It was more mechanical than anything else".
'Nice cellar'
In all, nearly 1,300 bottles and almost 200 magnums of Burgundy were stolen between 2017 and 2024, with a total value of more than €640,000.
"I'm under medical supervision. It appears that I am suffering from depression and that this would be palliative," the frail-looking defendant told the court.
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Claiming not to have sold "any" of the stolen bottles, the accused said he had "no idea" of the damage.
"It was to have a nice cellar. To make it look pretty", he told investigators when being interviewed.
The court acknowledged that his bank accounts did not show any enrichment.
Kleptomania
The deputy public prosecutor, Pascal Labonne-Collin, denounced the accused as a "compulsive thief", but stressed that he knew that he was "not stealing wine" and called for an 18-month suspended sentence and a €10,000 fine.
The defendant's lawyer pleaded her client suffered from "kleptomania" – a compulsive disorder that manifests as an inability to resist the urge to steal – that was diagnosed by a psychiatrist.
"His wife will say that he is always afraid of running out [of things] ... he's a hoarder", she added, but "he has no notion of business ... he buys wine to meet his friends and doesn't even take the ones from his cellar".
The case ranks among the largest of its kind – on a par with the theft in 2019 from the home of a Bordeaux wine broker of around a hundred cases of Petrus and Mouton-Rothschild – as well as a bottle of the highly prestigious Romanée-Conti, a Burgundy that prides itself on being the most expensive wine in the world.
