The Great Italian Wine Heist, and a verdict fifty years after Paris

€5 million of Super Tuscans

Over the weekend of October 3, seven masked men drove two trucks on false plates to Marchesi Antinori's warehouse at Cortona, in eastern Tuscany, where wine from all the family's estates is packed for shipping. They switched off the alarms, loaded the trucks with the warehouse's own forklifts and drove off. Staff found the wine gone on Monday morning, and Antinori kept quiet until Friday so as not to get in the investigators' way.

The haul was about 30,000 bottles worth around €5 million, all from the 2023 vintage. Between 8,000 and 10,000 were Solaia, and the rest included Tignanello and Guado al Tasso. At about €167 a bottle, close to what the wines cost new, this was the current release rather than an old cellar. It had been packed for shipment abroad, to the Bordeaux merchants who buy Solaia and to distributors in the United States and elsewhere.

Police and Carabinieri are going through the security footage. Renzo Cotarella, Antinori's chief executive, called the gang very well prepared and thinks it may be the same one that has hit other Italian wineries in recent months. He is confident the wine can be traced, since two truckloads are hard to move without drawing attention. Piero Antinori, the family's patriarch, told La Nazione the thieves knew exactly what they would find, likened it to walking into a jeweler's, and thinks the job was done to order. AP calls it Italy's biggest wine heist, far beyond the 2,000 bottles worth €750,000 taken near Cervia in 2017. As we write, no arrests have been reported, and Antinori has asked buyers everywhere to be wary of offers outside its usual channels.

The Antinori family has made wine in Tuscany since 1385, when Giovanni di Piero Antinori joined the Florentine winemakers' guild, and 26 generations later it still runs the business. Its 1971 Tignanello, made without the white grapes Chianti's rules then required, became one of the first Super Tuscans, as the wines that broke the local rules came to be called. Solaia comes from the sunniest part of the same hillside. It was first made in 1978, and only in the best years since, with none in 1980, 1981, 1983, 1984 or 1992. In 2000, Wine Spectator named the 1997 its wine of the year, the first Italian wine to top the list.

If anyone offers you a case of 2023 Solaia at a friendly price this winter, ask where it spent the first weekend in October.

Singapore splits the difference

In 1976, the British wine merchant Steven Spurrier set California's best reds and whites against France's best in a blind tasting in Paris, judged by French experts. Stag's Leap Wine Cellars' 1973 Cabernet Sauvignon came first among the reds, ahead of Mouton Rothschild and Haut-Brion, and Chateau Montelena's 1973 Chardonnay topped the whites. Time called it the Judgment of Paris, and California wine has been taken seriously ever since.

Fifty years on, Singapore held its own. On October 2 at Resorts World Sentosa, an international panel led by Lisa Perrotti-Brown MW, formerly editor-in-chief of The Wine Advocate, and Ronan Sayburn MS tasted 13 Chardonnays and 13 Cabernet Sauvignons, mostly 2019s, from Europe and the rest of the world, blind. The organizers call it a study, not a re-enactment.

The verdict came on Sunday. Among the reds, Vine Hill Ranch's 2019 Cabernet Sauvignon from Oakville, in Napa, finished first, ahead of Ducru-Beaucaillou, Château Margaux, Harlan Estate and Pichon Comtesse. Burgundy took the first five places among the whites, led by Bonneau du Martray's 2019 Corton-Charlemagne, with Coche-Dury second. In Paris, California took both. This time Napa kept the reds and France took the whites back. The judges were also asked which wines were European. They got it right about two times in three.

A good year in Sweden

Ästad Vingård, a family estate in a beech forest in southwest Sweden, made about 20,000 bottles of wine last year. This year it is taking in grapes for about 70,000, and this winter it starts building a winery for 300,000. Its grape is mostly Solaris, which thrives this far north, and it makes traditional-method sparkling wine. The estate also has a spa hotel with an underwater sauna, and a restaurant, ÄNG, with a Michelin star.

Warmer summers have made Swedish wine possible, though the weather still brings spring frost, hail and drought. Another estate, Kullabergs, poured its wine at the Nobel banquet last December.

France, meanwhile, has just picked one of its smallest harvests in decades. The agriculture ministry's statisticians put it at about 35 million hectoliters, 2% below last year, which was already France's smallest since 1957, and 14% below the five-year average, after heat waves, drought and the uprooting of vines. That shortfall alone comes to about 760 million bottles, more than ten thousand times Ästad's entire crop. The map is moving north, one sauna at a time.

Until Thursday.