I don’t know where you keep your bottles of Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, but I beg you to reconsider.
Around 5 p.m. on November 19, a middle-aged European couple walked into L’Auberge Provençale, a family-owned restaurant about an hour outside Washington, D.C., in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley wine country.
The restaurant holds a Best of Award from Wine Spectator and is one of the few in Virginia granted an annual allotment of Domaine de la Romanée-Conti by the single gatekeeper who decides which U.S. restaurants and shops are allowed to buy the Burgundy, often described as the greatest wine in the world. Having DRC on your list is more or less mandatory for landing that Wine Spectator distinction. It also functions as a master key, unlocking access to other wines distributors would otherwise never offer.
The couple stopped in unannounced to ask about using the private room for a 25-person dinner for the woman’s boss, the CEO of a Canadian finance company. Like so many CEOs of Canadian finance companies, this one was a stickler for proper wine storage. The couple therefore asked to inspect the restaurant’s wine cellar, which holds the 5,500 bottles listed across the restaurant’s 70-page wine book.
The man looked like he belonged in a Beastie Boys video, sporting a long overcoat, thick glasses, a bad toupee, and one glove. As they finished their temperature inspection and headed upstairs, their guide, wine director Christian Borel, whose parents turned the 1753 farmhouse into a restaurant in 1981, heard some clanging. He asked the Brits if they had taken anything. They did not answer. He took this as a bad sign.
He went back down to the cellar and checked the rack for the 2020 DRC, which has sold for $24,000 at auction. Instead of a DRC cork pointing toward him, he saw a screwcap. Five other high-end Burgundies were also gone. Sprinting upstairs, Borel yelled, “Stop them! They’re stealing the Romanée-Contis!”
This is when it became much more like a Beastie Boys video.
On the restaurant’s security camera, you can see the staff activate as if they ran weekly DRC recovery drills.
Three staff members bolted from the bar area and gave chase along with Borel. So did a regular customer who had been about to order an Old Fashioned. The couple reached their getaway vehicle, but a waiter grabbed the woman before she could get into the passenger seat. The man made it into the driver’s seat of their rented SUV, but Borel grabbed him and tried to pull him out. The man shoved him back and floored the accelerator, speeding off with the door open and nearly dragging Borel across the grass. During the melee, the thief dropped the 2019 Échézeaux and the 2021 Grands Échézeaux onto the lawn.
The still-sober regular jumped into his $200,000 Porsche Panamera 4S hybrid, another waiter climbed into the passenger seat, and they gave chase down U.S. 340 until traffic intervened and they were forced to impotently watch the thief drive away. The thief and his wine made it all the way to JFK Airport on Long Island, then flew on to Vienna, Austria. Interpol has since been put on the case.
The woman, Natali Ray, 56, is from Kent, England and, according to her LinkedIn bio, is a poet who specializes in translating literature from Serbian to English. She was charged with grand larceny, has not given up her accomplice, and is awaiting trial without bail at the Northwestern Regional Adult Detention Center. The Échézeaux and a Grands Échézeaux were handed over to police as evidence, along with a plea to keep them in a cool, dark place.
The wine police, which is my name for the police when they deal with wine crime, discovered that the toupee guy is 57-year-old Serb Nikola Krndija, whose name alone is Serbian literature that needs translating.
Without any victim blaming, this is not the first time an unsuspecting bottle of DRC has been targeted.
On December 25, 2014, a day after The French Laundry closed for renovations, a crew broke into the cellar and made off with DRCs and other wines worth more than $500,000. In 2019, thieves entered the Paris Catacombs, drilled into the cellar of Maison Rostang, and stole more DRCs. In 2021, a couple broke into Astrio in Cáceres, Spain, and nabbed more than 20 bottles. That time, the woman wore the wig.
I’m not saying restaurant owners should discriminate against people wearing wigs. But they do need to protect themselves. As a service to DRC holders, I asked what security measures the small group of restaurants lucky enough to be on the DRC list are actually using, so they can pool their collective wisdom.
“Foolishly, I’m not really protecting it from thievery, just heat and light,” admits Dave Gibbs, who owns the wine-focused Los Angeles restaurants Augustine, Sushi Note, and Mirabelle Wine Bar. “I should probably figure something better out, but I’m too lazy. I’ve got a couple of bottles at home in my office wine fridge, some in storage near Augustine, and a few in my lockers in Glendale.” Maybe the first step in protecting your DRCs is not telling me where they are when I didn’t even ask.
“Our wine selection is on display. But behind fridge doors,” Molly Brooks, the beverage director for Club 33, told me by text. She added that everyone inside is a vetted member or a guest of the club. Plus, stealing from Mickey Mouse is going to get you extra years in prison.
At Wally’s, which operates restaurant and retail locations in Beverly Hills, Santa Monica, and Las Vegas, the DRCs are kept in alarmed vaults accessible only to select staff members. “Whenever possible, bottles remain in their original wooden cases. Beyond preserving authenticity and value, original packaging adds a practical deterrent, as the size and weight make discreet removal far more difficult,” says Seann Hogan, vice president of brand experience.
Keith Goldston, the Master Sommelier at the Post Oak Hotel at Uptown Houston, who oversees a $6 million wine collection, displays much of it. But not the DRC. Bottles valued over $10,000 are locked inside a cage. That cage sits inside a card-accessed, temperature-controlled walk-in. “I like to mix them into the rest of the inventory in no particular order. Our cellars are laid out with a kind of modified ‘Dewey decimal point’ system, so when we stock wines, we are free to place wines wherever with no rhyme or reason,” he explains. “Finding the expensive wines is now kind of like finding a needle in a haystack versus having all the DRCs hanging out in one location. We also have cameras recording who goes in and out of the cellars.”
I hate that it has come to this. Earlier this year, Damon Lindelof, creator of shows such as Lost, The Leftovers, and Watchmen, told me that a comment he made on a podcast about Severance was directed at me. He said, “I’ve come to believe in the course of my life that there’s a direct proportion between people who know a lot about wine and evil. There’s no one more evil on this planet than sommeliers.”
I get that knowing about wine can seem classist, obnoxious, and designed to make others feel inferior. Which is what makes stealing a $24,000 bottle funny, in the same way it’s funny to lose your Bitcoin passwords or accidentally stock your guest bathroom with that bar of soap made from Sydney Sweeney’s bathwater.
But there should be an agreement among people lucky enough to know that a bottle of DRC is special. Kidnapping a bottle into a rental SUV and flying to Vienna sounds cat burglar suave, but it really just makes them anti–Jean Valjeans. There’s no valor in stealing from people who serve the rich and giving to a shady group of rich people who buy on the black market and, I’m guessing here, have probably been to Epstein Island.
It also forces restaurants to hide their wine and stop giving cellar tours. And those are the kinds of things that invite people into the wine world. And make us seem a little less evil.
