Escorting the couple through his restaurant’s high-end wine cellar, Christian Borel grew uneasy — the woman with her rapid-fire questions, the man with his long overcoat wandering in and out of view.
As the three walked back upstairs, Borel couldn’t shake the feeling. He raced back down and spotted them: screw-top replacements where his finest wines had once been.
Borel ran back up. “Stop them!” he shouted. “They’re stealing the Romanée-Contis!”
And the chase was on. Borel and three other staff members, joined by a patron in a Porsche, headed outside to try to catch the couple heading for their getaway car in the bucolic Shenandoah Valley wine country 60 miles west of Washington.
The take: six bottles of French pinot noir the restaurant valued at $38,000.
Matthew Leader, a waiter, caught the woman, detaining her with two firm hands atop her shoulders. The man climbed into the driver’s seat of an SUV as Borel, a sommelier, tried to force his way into the open door, according to Borel and Leader. But the SUV moved forward, they said, grass flew from under the tires and the man raced off alone down U.S. 340 in the countryside of Clarke County.
“There really is no honor among thieves,” Borel said Monday, recalling the chaos of last week outside the L’Auberge Provençale Inn & Restaurant, which Borel’s family has owned since 1981.
Clarke County Sheriff Travis Sumption said Tuesday that his investigators are still trying to identify the man who fled.
“They knew what they were doing,” Sumption said. “It was orchestrated and it was planned.”
Sumption identified the woman as Natali Ray, 56, from the United Kingdom. She was charged with three counts: conspiracy to commit grand larceny, grand larceny, and defrauding an inn or similar establishment, according to Sumption and Clarke County District Court records.
Ray is being held without bond at the Northwestern Regional Adult Detention Center and is due in court Dec. 3 for her arraignment, according to court records and jail officials. The records list her as being represented by the Virginia Public Defender Office. Peter McDermott, the head public defender for the region that includes Clarke County, declined to comment.
One piece of good news for the restaurant staff: Shortly after the SUV sped off, they found two of the lifted bottles unharmed in the grass: a 2019 Échézeaux and 2021 Grands Échézeaux. Borel turned them over to the sheriff’s office as evidence along with a plea for their storage: “A dark, cool place.”
Borel met with a Clarke County investigator for two hours Tuesday and said the investigator told him Ray hadn’t said anything about her alleged partner.
The thieves’ prize take — and until last week the wine cellar’s prize occupant — was a 2020 Romanée-Conti, valued by Borel at $24,000. Like all the stolen bottles, it came from the hallowed Domaine de la Romanée-Conti estate in Burgundy. “The perfect pinot noir,” he said.
He has alerted wine auction houses and provided serial numbers for each bottle. But given the black market for stolen high-end wines, Borel said, he doubts he’ll see them again. “They could be anywhere,” he said.
Bottles of Domaine de la Romanée-Conti have been targeted before.
In 2019, thieves reportedly broke into the Catacombs under Paris and drilled into the cellar of the acclaimed restaurant Maison Rostang, where they made off with $675,000 worth of wine. More than half the haul was from Domaine de la Romanée-Conti.
In 2020, French authorities recovered 900 stolen bottles, valued at $6 million,and arrested 24 people linked to a wine theft ring. Many of the bottles came from Domaine de la Romanée-Conti.
And in 2021, a couple posing as guests hit Astrio, a Michelin-starred restaurant and hotel in Spain. They broke into the cellar and left with dozens of bottles worth an estimated $1.7 million, including more than 20 from Domaine de la Romanée-Conti. Authorities said the woman, carrying a Swiss passport and wearing a wig, distracted the staff by ordering food late at night while her male companion took bottles. The pair were later apprehended and sentenced to four years in prison.
Wine lovers pay handsomely for Domaine de la Romanée-Conti. While the wines’ quality and limited production drive up prices, so too does a prestige factor.
“If you put that bottle on a table in Thailand or Singapore or Hong Kong, or wherever, you are that guy, right?” said Daniel Posner, owner of the upscale Grapes the Wine Co. in White Plains, New York. “It’s just elegant, refined, truly just delicious wine at the right age.”
The Domaine de la Romanée-Conti estate is home to different vineyards, Borel said, the most prized being the vineyard embedded in the estate’s name: Romanée-Conti. Fewer than 10 bottles from that vineyard, he said, make their way to restaurants and retailers in Virginia every year.
“It’s truly wild. It is the wine of basically the billionaires. It’s not the one percenters. It’s the point-o-one percenters,” Borel said in a video about the heist he posted on L’Auberge Provençale’s Facebook page.
Borel’s parents, Alain and Celeste Borel, bought the restaurant’s property 45 years ago. They turned the 1753 farmhouse into their inn and restaurant. The subterranean basement — with its humidity and cool temperatures — was perfect for the wine cellar. Christian Borel took over sommelier duties in 2008.
L’Auberge Provençale now has 1,280 varieties in the cellar for a total of 5,500 bottles. The collection is well documented, touted on the restaurant’s 70-page online wine list, which is served as a book to restaurant patrons.
“It’s not very hard to figure out we have expensive wines in our cellar,” Borel said.
When the restaurant is closed, its cellar is protected by locks, sensors, cameras and alarms. During operations, though, the staff needs continuous access. And when a customer asks for a tour and the restaurant isn’t packed, Borel has long been happy to oblige.
“My default is to be polite and trust people,” Borel said. “I’m in the hospitality business.”
The couple walked in about 4:45 p.m. Nov. 19, spoke with a staff member and soon were chatting with Borel. The woman’s bearing — wool coat, silk scarf, fine manners in a British accent — suggested an English motherly figure, Borel recalled. She said her boss, a Canadian businesswoman, wanted to hold a 25-person dinner in a private room with plenty of fine wine — the kind of gathering Borel knew could bring in more than $20,000.
He led the couple through the restaurant’s three dining rooms. The man didn’t say much. He wore a bushy gray toupee, which Borel found striking but hardly unheard of, along with thick glasses, the overcoat and dark pants, according to internal surveillance images provided by Borel.
Leader, the waiter, took note of the man’s hair but not much else. “The last thing you’re thinking is these guys are about to do a high-end robbery of the wine cellar,” he said.
The woman asked Borel how L’Auberge Provençale’s wines were stored. “I want to make sure it’s climate-controlled,” he remembered her saying.
The three descended into the cellar, which is about 30 feet long and 25 feet wide with bottles laid in several rows of shelves stretching to the ceiling. The woman continued asking questions.
“Are there American wines that someone who loves French wine would like to try?” Borel recalled her asking.
He took her toward those wines. As the man wandered off, Borel’s trust waned but his politeness held. He picked up a California cabernet called “The Diplomat” bearing a quote attributed to Winston Churchill that he thought she’d enjoy. “Diplomacy,” he read to her, “is the art of telling people to go to hell in such a way that they ask for directions.”
The man in the coat suddenly appeared. “Everything’s great, but we really have to go,” Borel remembered the woman saying.
The man moved awkwardly up the stairs, seemingly unable to bend or rotate his torso as they reached the first floor.
“Hold on for a sec,” Borel told the couple. He raced back down, saw the screw-top decoys, raced back up, saw the couple in the parking lot and ran after them. “No, no, no, no, no!” he shouted. “Absolutely not!”
Leader, the waiter, joined the chase, as did Stuart Brennen, another sommelier, according to internal video provided by the restaurant. The duo’s SUV, the posse could now see, was parked down the road about 100 yards from the restaurant.
The couple ran toward it. Borel heard clinking sounds.
Regular customer Ryan Dotson, who’d been at the bar about to order an old-fashioned, marched out to his $200,000 Porsche Panamera 4S hybrid as senior waiter Drew Chaney entered the passenger seat. “Hurry, hurry,” Dotson said.
They zoomed down U.S. 340 and tried to pull in front of the getaway car, according to Dotson’s dashboard video recordings, but his Porsche was hit by another car — taking Dotson out of the chase. The getaway car zoomed off.
By then the female suspect was under custody of Leader, the waiter. She offered a number of stories, through seemingly false tears, according to Leader and Borel: She’d met the man on a cruise, she’d just been abducted by him, she’d been forced into the heist. She asked if they’d just let her walk away. Instead they boxed her into a loose perimeter and waited for the police.
“You’re not,” Leader said, injecting an expletive, “going anywhere.”
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