How on earth did thieves walk away with £1.3m of fine wines from the metal lined cellar of Paris’s oldest restaurant?
It’s hosted everyone from the late Queen to Salvador Dali — and even safeguarded its rare vintages from the Nazis. So...
THE wine cellar of La Tour d’Argent, the oldest restaurant in Paris, is so venerated that only customers who order the most expensive vintages or otherwise ‘ prove their interest’ are granted a guided tour.
Members of the fortunate few are then escorted into the bowels of the restaurant by a member of staff wearing white tie and tails, who ceremoniously rings a copper bell to announce the visitor’s arrival to the security men who guard its contents round the clock.
Once there, they are confronted by a warren of 27 rooms holding more than 300,000 bottles with a combined value of £21million.
The 25,000 most valuable bottles, all priced at £250 and over, are stored in a special area on the first floor of the cellar, which has walls reinforced with battleship-grade metal to prevent any thieves tunnelling in, and no one — not even the head sommelier — is allowed in there alone.
Which makes it all the more shocking that a routine inventory conducted last month revealed that 83 bottles of some of its rarest wines, worth more than £1.3million between them, had gone missing.
There were no signs of a break-in and the only other thing we know for sure, according to the restaurant, is that the theft could have taken place at any time in the last four years.
The Third Division of the Paris Judicial Police is on the case but, with the trail colder than the constant temperature of 54f (or 12c) at which La Tour’s wines are kept, no one can be confident that the very discerning burglars — you might call them a premier crew — will ever be brought to justice.
Call me Maigret, but the fact that the restaurant underwent extensive renovations for more than a year before reopening last summer would seem to point to either an enterprising oenophile among the team of builders or someone in a position to take advantage of the disruption to sneak out a succession of fine vintages.
AND what treasures they were. A list of the missing bottles includes a number of red Burgundys from the prestigious Domaine de la Romanee-Conti, home to some of the world’s greatest wines.
The wine merchant Berry Bros & Rudd lists one 2010 grand cru at £30,000 a bottle. And that’s the retail price. Restaurants in Paris mark up wine to as much as five or six times the buying price.
It’s not the first time that La Tour, which reached a new audience after it was revealed as the inspiration behind the 2007 hit film Ratatouille — the tale of a young rodent who achieves his dreams of becoming a chef at a famous eatery in the French capital — has had issues with kleptomaniacs.
In the book Wine And War: The French, The nazis, And The Battle For France’s Greatest Treasure, the authors Donald and Petie Kladstrup described how, in June 1940 — within days of the Germans occupying Paris — an emissary from Field Marshal hermann Goring asked to see the cellar.
In the succeeding months, the nazis carted off no fewer than 80,000 bottles. They would have taken many more were it not for the quick thinking of Claude Terrail, who ran the restaurant until 2003 before leaving it to his son, André.
On the night the nazis entered the city, he personally constructed a brick wall that had the effect of creating a secret cellar within a cellar, behind which he hid 20,000 of the restaurant’s choicest wines. Following the end of the war, the restaurant — which translates as The Silver Tower — built up its collection anew and last year celebrated its reopening with a ‘wine bible’ that weighed in at no less than 9kg and is wheeled to diners’ tables on a trolley.
As its menu was equally highly rated — La Tour was awarded three Michelin stars in 1933 and held them for more than half a century — and its sixth- floor dining room offered spectacular views of notre Dame and Sacre Coeur, it attracted a star-studded array of customers.
Famous diners have included our late Queen (as Princess elizabeth in 1948), Charlie Chaplin, Salvador Dali, Sir Mick Jagger, Prince, Robert De niro, Dustin hoffman, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. In one memorable week, Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin both turned up (separately, not together).
Many will have ordered La Tour’s signature dish, canard au sang, or bloody duck, which was invented by the 19th- century owner Frederic Delair.
The Challans ducks, widely considered to be the most succulent breed available, are raised on the restaurant’s own farm in western
France before being slaughtered by strangling so no blood is lost and put on a train to Paris the very same day.
At the restaurant kitchen, they are plucked and cleaned of entrails — with only the liver, heart and gizzards left in — and partially roasted. The duck is then sent to a preparation table in the centre of the restaurant, where the breast, legs, and liver are removed and the skin set to one side. The carcass — skin, bones and all — is put into a solid silver duck press designed by blue chip tableware company Christofle to release its blood and marrow juices.
These are then thickened and flavoured with the duck liver — which has been blended into a puree — and mixed with cognac and madeira.
The resulting sauce is unctuous and very strong tasting, with a muddy- brown appearance. In short, not to everyone’s taste.
It was Delair’s bright idea to award a numbered certificate to every customer who ordered the dish, a practice that continues to this day.
Japan’s future emperor hirohito was served number 53,211 in 1921, President Roosevelt number 112,151 and Marlene Dietrich number 203,728. The restaurant celebrated its millionth duck in 2003 and the total is now said to have topped 1.2million.
This has proved a highly profitable
enterprise over the years: today the Duckling Frederic Delair costs 370 euros for two (£315).
Disaster struck in 1996 when Michelin reduced La Tour’s rating to two stars and, when that was cut back still further to one star ten years later, it was considered such an earth-shattering event that TV crews camped outside the restaurant’s entrance for days.
But its reputation for serving the finest wines in the world has never wavered and, for 37 years, the man who oversaw La Tour’s £1 million annual wine-buying budget was not a Frenchman but — quelle horreur! — an Englishman.
Derek Ridgway, the son of an antiques dealer from Surrey, started his career as a 19-year-old in 1975 at the Waterside Inn in Bray before heading abroad, first to Germany and then France, where he applied for a job at La Tour purely on the basis he had once dined there.
Within a year he was head sommelier — at 26. ‘There is no age for talent,’ Claude Terrail once said in defence of his controversial appointment. ‘It is a gift from the heavens. I couldn’t care less that he’s English. All I care about is how he does his job.’
When Ridgway took over in 1981, the 100page wine list consisted of 1,000 wines. By the time he left in 2018, it ran to 400 pages, with 15,000 wines.
There was one glaring omission, however. One dreadful day, a now ex-employee broke the oldest bottle in the cellar, an 1811 Chateau Lafite.
‘He did a Chaplinesque thing with a stepladder and knocked it onto the floor,’ Ridgway once recalled. ‘How much was it worth? I’d rather not think about it.’
Who can blame him? An 1869 bottle of this magnificent Bordeaux sold at auction in 2010 for a world record price of £233,973.
Today, the restaurant’s oldest wine is another Bordeaux, a relatively spritely 1845 Chateau Leoville Barton.
Or was. It remains to be seen whether it was one of the targets of the robber, or robbers, who pulled off one of the most lucrative wine heists ever.