Wine Heist Bust

Filed in archive Wine News on April 9, 2007

Seems like stealing wine is the newest trend in burglaries, especially in California. Actually, this makes some sense if you know where to sell it afterwards. It's not like we lock up our wine.

From Housecleaner, boyfriend arrested after brazen wine heist:

Investigators are breaking out the bubbly this weekend after arresting a housecleaner and her boyfriend in connection with one of the nation's most brazen wine heists.

According to police records, thieves broke into an oenophile's posh home in this Silicon Valley suburb on Jan. 4, spiriting off with 454 bottles of wine worth $139,000. Their booty included a magnum of 1959 Petrus worth as much as $6,000 and a difficult-to-assemble set of Bordeaux wines representing an unbroken line of more than 20 years of French harvests.

The heist-thought to be one of the largest of its kind-was the handiwork of seasoned connoisseurs and insiders: The criminals removed few lesser-valued bottles and focused on "cult wines" made in limited numbers, often signed by vintners. They left no sign of forced entry.

Police were stumped. And last week, after another dozen bottles of wine worth $350 each went missing from the same home, wine collectors nationwide went on high alert.

Determined to find the audacious culprit, Atherton detective Sgt. Joe Wade installed cameras in the restocked cave. Live video feeds went straight to his office.

[...] Two days later, Wade checked the video feed in his office-and the camera was pointed toward a wall.

"We think he was trying to find its source so that he could take the tape and all the evidence," Wade said of Xiang. "The only problem was that he wasn't able to do it before I got his face."

On Thursday, Atherton detectives kristin Nichols and David Metzger confronted Xiang in front of his Belmont house. With a search warrant, they found some of the stolen bottles and arrested Xiang. They asked Deng to come to the police station, where they arrested her, too.

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