Burgundy’s wines are not cheap, and inventories are carefully monitored. Last year, the team at Maison Albert Bichot began to notice bottles were disappearing from their Beaune cellar. Somehow the wine was walking out the cellar door without anyone noticing—a few bottles here, a few bottles there, like a slow, sporadic drip. So the staff installed hidden security cameras.
On the morning of Feb. 8, they watched as a trusted, middle-aged maintenance worker purloined two bottles of Nuit-St.-Georges premier cru and two bottles of Chambolle-Musigny worth a total of €522, or about $575.
This event set in motion an investigation that led to the Dijon Tribunal. On Aug. 6, the 56-year-old worker was found guilty of stealing nearly 1,500 bottles worth roughly €600,000 euros from three wineries over a period of seven years, though he had allegedly been walking off with wines for far longer. François (his surname has been withheld by the court) received a one-year suspended prison sentence and was fined €10,000.
His defense? Kleptomania.
Thousands of Wine Bottles Were Hidden in His House—and Mom’s
According to Olivier Caracotch, the Dijon prosecutor, there is no evidence François ever drank or sold anything he pilfered. His peculiar thirst for acquiring high-end Burgundy began roughly 15 years ago while working blue-collar jobs for various Côte d’Or wineries. The current case covers wines stolen between 2017 and 2024, when he worked for Maison Joseph Drouhin, Albert Bichot and a third, unnamed négociant.
After catching him red-handed on camera last February, Albert Bichot’s director went to the police and filed a criminal complaint. François, who had worked for them since 2020, was ordered to leave the premises; the sight of a police car caused him to panic and he fled into the cellars, where he was quickly caught and cuffed. The four bottles were found stashed in the loft of the warehouse.
[article-img-container][src=2024-08/ns_bichot-cellar-theft-081524_1600.jpg] [credit= (Photo by Michel Joly)] [alt= The cellars of Maison Albert Bichot in Beaune.][end: article-img-container]
Armed with a search warrant, detectives uncovered the astonishing extent of his “collecting.” In the cellar under his house, they found a couple thousand bottles—some labeled, others not. Then they found another couple thousand bottles under the backyard terrace and another couple thousand under the front yard terrace. When the cops confronted him with his larceny, François broke down and revealed a fourth location—his mother’s cellar.
A representative of Albert Bichot was called to the cellars, where he spotted wines from two other négociants for whom the man had worked. The existence of unlabelled bottles was particularly damning—wines are usually labeled just prior to shipping.
In the end, the prosecutor charged François with stealing 1,285 bottles and 186 magnums from his three most recent employers. Among the loot were 56 bottles of Vosne-Romanée premier cru and 46 bottles of a Chambertin grand cru.
He Liked to Contemplate the Wine
When questioned by investigators, who described him as “half-kleptomaniac, half-collector,” he admitted his guilt and explained that he had stolen the wine to have a beautiful cellar. “To make it look pretty,” he said. He liked to “sit in the middle of his cellars to contemplate them.”
His defense lawyer, Nathalie Lepert de Courville, argued it was her client’s way of communing with beauty. “Wine has been a marker of Western society since antiquity, becoming sacred during the Last Supper. Wine is also a work of art. He seizes the beautiful, the spiritual, to keep it close to him.”
His wife, who has since left him, described him as a “hoarder.” An expert witness suggested kleptomania.
He certainly exhibited none of the attributes one might associate with a grand cru thief. He lived a modest lifestyle and enjoyed gardening and hunting with his friends. His ancestors had been vignerons in the region. His bank accounts showed no signs of illegal gains. Prosecutors admitted that “nothing indicates he sold a single bottle.”
[article-img-container][src=2024-08/ns_alberic-bichot-cellar-081524_1600.jpg] [credit= (Photo by Michel Joly)] [alt= Albéric Bichot of Maison Albert Bichot in the wine cellar in Beaune.][end: article-img-container]
An Esteemed and Dedicated Employee—Aside from the Kleptomania
In court, he told the judges that “it was more mechanical than anything.” A psychiatrist suggested to him that the stealing might have been an expression of a brewing depression. He recounted how he might steal “a few bottles a week, never more than twenty.” Sometimes he stole nothing when he had too much work, as “work came first.”
In the end, prosecutors charged him with theft—226 bottles and 27 magnums, worth €161,720, from the cellars of Joseph Drouhin, taken while he worked there from 2017 to 2018, as well as 1,059 bottles and 159 magnums, worth €420,085, taken from Albert Bichot.The precise quantity and its value stolen from the third négociant was not made public, but is thought to be significantly smaller, with the total value of the wines stolen during the seven year period €641,805.
Albert Bichot was a plaintiff in the case and asked for a single symbolic euro in compensation. The winery’s lawyer emphasized “the human dimension of the case.” The winery staff described him as an “esteemed and dedicated” employee and did not want to “burden him.”
All of the wine was returned to its owners.
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