I found out about the theft this morning as I was on my way to a Pilates lesson. I had forgotten my phone and was in two minds to go get it, but duty called. There was a message from Dorit, my PR lady, she had BBM’d me, “wake up, the winery has been robbed.” Well, it’s difficult to ignore a message like that. After a few phone calls I was on my way to the winery via my parents house to pick up my Dad.

We arrived at the winery at about 11am everyone was in a still state of shock, but theft notwithstanding we also had a harvest to deal with so the winery was incredibly busy, grapes coming in, police, insurance assessors, come to think of it there were a lot of insurance people there, and the press. I didn’t know this but as soon as there is a major incident, apparently we are major, the police send out a message to all the press informing them of the event. So it wasn’t long before I was involved in an altercation with some troglodyte photographer from Haarez newspaper.  

We took a look around the winery and to be honest it was difficult to decide where to start.

We saw the hole in the fence that the thieves had cut in order to access the winery, they had come in through a vineyard that borders us, parked by the fence and ferried the wine with our fork lift truck to their waiting vehicle.

We walked through the warehouse and saw the gaps in the stacks where the wine had been taken.  A couple of things were apparent, the thieves had a shopping list, and they were also totally illiterate. Only high value and commercial wines were stolen, and instead of identifying the wines by what was written on the boxes as most people would, they cut open the sides of the boxes to check the bottles inside, hmm…. We were lucky, lucky? well, relatively speaking, that they left one pallet of Alma behind on the fork-lift.

The most harrowing part of the visit was seeing the offices, they were completely ransacked and in a terrible state. Cupboards and drawers had been emptied and tables upturned. The safe had been prized open and money and checks removed. The thieves must have been hungry because they then went into the kitchen and polished off any stale food we had in the fridge. 

The rest of the day was spent with the police and insurance people conducting an investigation of the events of the previous night. I have to say that I am constantly impressed at the level of dedication shown by the police here and today was no exception, they were prompt and thorough with their investigation and I am confident that they will bring a satisfactory resolution to the events of today.

Now to address the elephant in the room, yes, this is not the first time we have been robbed, so what have we learned since the first time, well, we totally upgraded the security system in the winery, I will not go into details. But no matter how sophisticated your alarm system they can always be over ridden and any night watchman can be overpowered or worse. And it might sound a little arrogant here but if you have a bankable product then someone is always going to want to steal it.

Now if you’ll excuse me, it has been a pretty long and fairly awful day, I am totally knackered and going to bed. I hope tomorrow will be better.

www.daltonwinery.com