Spanish couple jailed for stealing wine worth 1.6 million euros from Michelin star restaurant

A Spanish court on Monday jailed a married couple for stealing 45 bottles of wine worth more than 1.6 million euros from a hotel restaurant in what police called a “carefully planned” heist. A bottle of Château D'Yquem 1806 worth €350,000 was among the wines stolen from the Atrio Hotel in Caceres, south-west Spain, in an October 2021 heist that made global headlines.

A court in Caceres jailed a woman for four years and a man for four and a half years after finding them guilty of burglary. The court also ordered the couple, who were arrested in July 2022 in Croatia, to pay the hotel 753,454 euros in damages.

The woman, who according to Spanish press reports is a former Mexican beauty queen, checked into the hotel using a fake Swiss passport, a court heard. After dining at the hotel's three-Michelin-star restaurant, the pair took a tour of the renowned Atrio wine cellar before retiring to their room.

At 2 a.m., the woman called the front desk and asked the “only employee” working at the time to make her a salad, according to the court order. At first, the employee declined the request because he was alone, and the couple ate the 14-course tasting menu, but he finally agreed because she kept insisting.

While an employee was preparing a salad, a man slipped into the reception area and stole an electronic key that he believed would allow entry to the wine cellar, but was wrong. Outside the wine cellar, the man called his partner and again told her to distract the receptionist, so she asked for dessert.

“The defendant returned to the reception and took master key number 27 from the box, which he used to open the wine cellar, from where he took 45 bottles of wine,” the court said.

The man, who is said to have Romanian and Dutch citizenship, took the bottles to his room in a backpack and two large bags before the receptionist returned to his seat. The pair “carefully planned” the robbery and visited the restaurant three times to prepare for the raid, Spain's national police said in a statement when the pair were arrested.