Featured Image Credit: Cepa 21 winery
Topics: Business, Crime, Food and Drink, World News
Niamh Shackleton
Topics: Business, Crime, Food and Drink, World News
An intruder has broken into a Spanish winery and spilled out millions of euros worth of contents.
Police have launched an investigation into the matter after a hooded fiend got into Cepa 21 winery in Spain in the early hours of Sunday morning (February 18).
In CCTV footage, a person wearing what looks to be some sort of raincoat runs up to one of the barrels and opens it up, causing gallons of wine to come rushing out.
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Five tanks were opened up by the intruder, but only three of them contained wine.
In total, 60,000 litres of the alcoholic beverage was lost, enough to fill around 80,000 bottles, meaning Cepa 21 has suffered a devastating €2.5 million ($2.7 million) loss.
As it stands, it's unclear who the culprit is - but a spokesperson for the winery said that the tanks are 'very hard to open' without a prior understand of its security mechanism.
With this is mind, it's presumed that the intruder 'is used to opening these tanks and is familiar with this kind of machinery'.
The spokesperson continued to tell BBC News: "This person was moving very smoothly [across the winery grounds], even though it was dark and there was no light.
"This must be a person who knows the grounds well."
While there is the possibility of it being a current or former employee of Cepa 21's, he went on to say that - as it stands - there are no grounds to pin their suspicions on anyone.
Cepa 21's wines are retails at $44 - $100, depending on the grape.
Jose Moro, the winemaker who owns Cepa 21, has since spoken out about the ordeal.
"It's a case of doing harm for the sake of doing harm, by someone who can't be very balanced, hasn't got much common sense and is acting out of hatred," he told Spanish public television TVE.
"Everything indicates the person knew where they were."
While $2.7 million is an undeniably huge loss, it isn't the biggest to have happened to a winery.
In 2005, an arsonist set fire to a warehouse which destroyed six million bottles of wine.
This resulted in a catastrophic loss of around $164 million in today's cash.
The man behind the ordeal, Mark Anderson, was arrested two years later. He allegedly started the fire to cover up embezzlement.