I have a small obsession with tracking weird crimes. Although weird might be too narrow a definition. Unusual crimes. Bizarre crimes. Crimes that make you stop scrolling and think, Wait. What the actual heck?

I don’t necessarily want to solve them. I’m not planning to start a corkboard with photographs, red string, and a map of Tuscany. Although, now that I think about it, that sounds like a perfectly reasonable way to spend a Saturday.

Anyway, my latest rabbit hole involves a wine heist in Italy.

Thieves reportedly stole approximately 30,000 bottles of some of Italy’s most prized wines from a winery in Tuscany, with an estimated value of €5 million, or about $5.8 million. The producer described it as the largest wine theft of its kind in Italian history.

Thirty. Thousand. Bottles.

These weren’t bottles of supermarket plonk you buy when you’ve had a day and need something to take the edge off. The stolen wines were all from the 2023 vintage, with retail prices ranging from €150 to €500 per bottle. Among them were around 10,000 bottles of Solaia, one of the winery’s flagship wines.

And apparently, 2023 was an exceptional year for the wine.

Which brings me to an important distinction. 2023 may have been an exceptional year for wine, but it was a spectacularly crappy year for me.

Loss. Stress. More loss. The sort of year that makes you wonder whether the universe has mistaken you for someone who signed up for an extreme psychological endurance course.

But apparently, while I was busy navigating the emotional equivalent of a natural disaster, the grapes in Tuscany were having the time of their lives.

Good for the grapes, I suppose.

Now, I have questions. Many questions.

How exactly do you steal 30,000 bottles of expensive wine without someone noticing? Where do you put it? And what, precisely, is the resale strategy here? Because I imagine it’s rather difficult to unload 10,000 bottles of Solaia on Facebook Marketplace without attracting some attention.

“Hi, is this still available?”

“Yes. Cash only. No questions.”

And what do the thieves plan to do with all that wine? Open an exclusive underground wine club? Supply a small nation? Spend the next decade hosting dinner parties where everyone is mysteriously drinking the same exceptionally rare vintage?

Or perhaps they’re planning the ultimate self-care experience. A swimming pool filled with stolen Tuscan wine.

A sangria pool bath, anyone?

Although, at €150 to €500 a bottle, that would be a spectacularly expensive way to ruin your skin, waste perfectly good wine, and leave the bathroom smelling like a vineyard after a natural disaster.

I’ll stick to my regular bath.

Meanwhile, I’ll continue tracking unusual crimes, because apparently my brain has decided that in addition to everything else I have to think about, I also need to know what criminals are doing with five million euros’ worth of wine.

Some people follow celebrity gossip. Some follow sports. I follow people who steal 30,000 bottles of wine and then presumably have to figure out what the hell to do with them.

We all have our coping mechanisms.

And if 2023 was a terrible year for you, too, take comfort in this. At least you probably don’t have to figure out where to hide 30,000 bottles of Solaia.

Unless you did. In which case, we need to talk.