Holiday season is high time for Champagne—apparently, both for wine lovers and wine thieves. In France, several suspects recently attempted an Ocean’s Eleven–style heist of two truckloads of Moët & Chandon, but when French police pursued them, it turned into a high-speed chase worthy of a Fast & Furious movie.
In the early hours of Nov. 11, the thieves snuck into the lot of a logistics company in an industrial zone on the outskirts of the French town of Reims in the heart of the Champagne region. There, they stole two semitrucks loaded with more than $600,000 worth of Moët & Chandon. They drove off at a leisurely, nothing-to-see-here-folks pace, headed for Paris.
Despite their careful preparation, they had not counted on the GPS tracking devices placed in the trucks. The trucks’ change in location eventually triggered an alarm, alerting the police. More than an hour and 85 miles later, local cops swung into action, picking up the convoy near the town of Gretz-Armainvilliers, where it had joined the highway leading to the capital.
The first driver, apparently unimpressed by the motor power under the hood of the cop car, tried to outrun the law. When that didn't work, he attempted to run the police off the road. Traffic forced him to slow, at which point, with the truck going about 10 miles per hour, a white BMW pulled up next to the cab and the truck’s driver leapt into the car. Focused on preventing the truck from hitting any innocents, one officer climbed out, jogged alongside the still-rolling truck, jumped in and hit the brakes. In the chaos, the BMW disappeared.
Meanwhile, the second truck swerved off the highway, smashed through traffic barriers, pulled into a service station and stopped. By the time police got to it, it was unoccupied.
Investigators have not identified the thieves yet, but the cargo survived, intact and ready for the holidays.
This is not the first autumn bubbly heist. In October 2022, another well-orchestrated plot targeted 800 cases of G.H. Martel Champagne worth roughly $200,000. The stolen truck used to haul away the bubbly cargo was later found abandoned near Paris. Investigators traced the Champagne to a warehouse south of the city, where they arrested several suspects, who had managed to sell 600 cases. The original thieves were never identified. Could there be a gang with a taste for Champagne still on the loose?
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