A legendary restaurant in Paris which once hosted the late Queen Elizabeth has reportedly “lost” wine worth more than a million pounds.
Dozens of bottles appear to be missing from La Tour d’Argent’s cellar, according to Le Parisien newspaper.
The cellar has a collection of more than 300,000 bottles, some of which date back to pre-Revolution France.
La Tour d’Argent, which also inspired the Pixar film Ratatouille, reportedly filed a complaint with Paris Police this month after discovering the £1.28m loss.
The theft could have been carried out any time between January 2020 and January 2024. The cellar showed no signs of a break-in.
Among the wine missing are bottles from Domaine de la Romanée-Conti (DRC), an estate in Burgundy renowned for producing some of the world’s finest and most expensive vintages.
Their bottles often sell for five-figure prices, with wine sellers pricing a 1999 DRC Grand Cru at around £24,000.
La Tour d’Argent underwent a major renovation in 2022 and reopened in summer 2023 with a “wine bible”. The book lists the contents of the cellar and weighs 8kg, having to be wheeled out to customers on a trolley.
The restaurant hosted Queen Elizabeth in 1948 when she was gifted a bottle of cognac from 1830.
Other famous customers include Theodore Roosevelt, Charlie Chaplin, Salvador Dali, Steven Spielberg and Bill Clinton.
It became famous for its canard au sang (duck in blood), where a duck is roasted then crushed in a press and its juices made into a sauce.
