A man and a woman were sentenced on Monday to four and four and a half years in prison respectively by a Spanish court for theft 45 exceptional bottles of wine worth 1.64 million euros ($1.75 million).
A court in Cáceres (west) issued this sentence for the robbery that took place in the restaurant and hotel Lobby of this city in October 2021, the justice system said in a statement.
Among the stolen wines was a bottle of Chateau D’Yquem 1806 whose price on the letter was 350,000 euros, another from the same cellar from the 1883 vintage (45,000 euros), and several Romanée-Conti Grand Crus from different vintages and of great value.
The two were “convicted of committing a robbery crime” and “must also pay jointly and severally 753,454 euros” to the institute.
According to the Spanish press, the convicts are a former Mexican beauty queen and a Romanian-Dutch man, arrested in July 2022 in Croatia.
The two stayed at the hotel and at the restaurant, in a room where only the woman with a fake Swiss passport was registered, the report reports.
After dinner at the hotel restaurant, they had a guided tour of the cellar and then went up to their room.
At two o’clock in the morning, the defendant called the reception, asking for a salad from the “only employee who was in the hotel-restaurant at the time,” the statement reads.
Initially the clerk refused, because he was alone at the reception, and because he was surprised that the couple had ordered “a 14-course tasting menu” to eat after dinner, but ended up accepting at the woman’s insistence.
The accused took advantage of the fact that the worker went to the kitchen to steal an electronic key from the reception with which he went to the warehouse, but it was not the right key.
“The defendant from the cellar door called the woman to re-entertain the receptionist,” then asked him to bring dessert.
“The accused went back to the reception and from a box he took the master key number 27, opening with it the cellar, accessing the tasting room where he confiscated 45 bottles of wine that he kept in a backpack and two large bags that immediately go up to the room before the employee returns to the front desk,” the statement read.
Source: Clarin
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