A Thief Stole $600,000 Worth of Wine From This L.A. Bottle Shop

Tori Latham
·2 min read
9

In Los Angeles, a thief is drinking well tonight.

Over the weekend, someone broke into Venice’s Lincoln Fine Wines and walked away with $600,000 worth of high-end bottles, the Los Angeles Times reported on Tuesday. The suspect cleaned out most of the shop’s cellar, where the most expensive wines are located.

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“It took me years to build up that collection,” Nazmul Haque, the store’s owner, told the L.A. Times. “To lose 10, 15 year’s worth of work overnight is devastating. I’m not sure if I will recover emotionally.”

Around 12:30 a.m. on Saturday, an unidentified person cut a hole into the roof of Lincoln Fine Wines, then lowered himself into the cellar. Working over four hours, the thief took a good deal of the store’s Burgundy and Bordeaux, the manager Nick Martinelle told the newspaper. That included a $4,500 bottle of Chateau Petrus 2016, as well as a 1994 vintage from the Corton-Charlemagne family, a 2008 Bonneau du Martray, a 2018 Louis Latour, a 2019 Domaine Roulot, and a 2020 Pierre-Yves Colin-Morey. All of those bottles ranged in price from a few hundred dollars to a few thousand.

Haque told the L.A. Times that about 60 percent of his premium merchandise was stolen. But the thief did leave behind some pricier bottles, like a $9,000 1975 Glenfiddich “Rare Collection” single-malt whiskey. Now Haque and Martinelle are working to complete a list of all the wine and spirits that were stolen, so they can tell wholesalers, buyers, and auction houses to keep an eye out for the goods.

“There are some unscrupulous buyers out there who will purchase a bottle of wine with no questions asked,” Martinelle said. “We just hope that if the wine does come up, we’ll be alerted.”

One Lincoln Fine Wines customer said that the burglary could have been an inside job, but Haque wouldn’t speculate on that point. Given the specificity with which the thief targeted the store, however, he did say that whoever carried out the heist had knowledge of the shop’s layout. And Martinelle noted that some security cameras and sensors had been disabled earlier in the week.

While the theft is a big monetary loss for the store, the news has prompted more people to shop at Lincoln Fine Wines in the past few days, with Sunday seeing double the regular number of customers. That might not make up the full $600,000 deficit, but Haque said he’s happy to be on the receiving end of his community’s support.

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