![]() When he came back up, he told his partner, José Polo, to get off the video conference call he was on. Immediately suspecting something was up, Pérez went down to see for himself. The sommelier asked Toño Pérez, Atrio’s co-owner and chef, if they had been moved as part of recent works to replace the cellar’s lighting system. The cost of their stay became apparent at about 1.20pm that day when one of Atrio’s sommeliers noticed the cellar door was open and bottles were missing. ![]() The man, who had arrived a few hours later, had no luggage at all and had not been registered as an overnight guest. The woman had checked in with only a rucksack that weighed practically nothing. “He had two big bags and a rucksack on his back.” “That was the last I saw of them,” he said. The manager opened the front door and the pair strolled out into the pre-dawn silence. They settled the bill and declined a taxi, asking instead which road would take them to Seville. Something had come up, the pair from 107 said, and they needed to check out early. What else has man created that’s still alive after two hundred years? How do you put a value on that?Īll was quiet until about 5.30am, when the lift doors opened on reception level. With it, he opened the cellar door and helped himself. ![]() I said the same time as the salad.”Īs the manager arranged the fruit on a small plate and took the order up to 107, the man crept back to reception and located one of the master keycards. “I told her they were specially made and I wasn’t a cook, but offered her some cut-up fruit. “It was her asking for pudding,” the night manager said. When it did not, he rang his partner, telling her to buy him more time. While the woman distracted the night manager, the man slipped down to the empty reception desk, from where he took a keycard that, he hoped, would open Atrio’s 45,000-bottle cellar. ![]() Top of the pair’s list that night was a rare and long-lived Château d’Yquem, a bottle whose pale gold tint had darkened to tawny in the two centuries since it was created in 1806, a year that began with Admiral Lord Nelson’s state funeral at St Paul’s Cathedral in London and ended with the premiere in Vienna of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto in D major. Nor was her dinner companion.Īt the moment the manager was assembling the salad, the couple were engaged in a meticulously planned attempt to relieve one of the world’s finest restaurant cellars of its greatest treasures in a €1.6m wine theft that would make headlines around the world, trigger an international police operation and end, two months ago, with lengthy prison terms. What the manager did not know – and what would not become painfully evident until 12 hours later – was that the woman in 107 was not who she claimed to be. ![]() It was 2.10am on Wednesday 27 October 2021. Fifteen minutes, he told her, then he left reception and went to the kitchen. “But then I thought: ‘This is a five-star hotel, I must serve her.’” The hungry woman accepted his offer of a salad and asked how long it would take. Three times the guest asked if he couldn’t rustle up a little something and three times he politely refused. The night manager said he was sorry, but the kitchen was closed. “But asking for something to eat? That was very, very odd.” “People sometimes ask for a herbal tea, or a coffee, or a glass of something,” he would recall in court later. In the eight years he had spent in the elegant gloom of Atrio, a luxury restaurant and hotel in Cáceres, three hours’ drive south-west of Madrid, the night manager could recall only two similar requests. W asn’t it a little odd, thought the night manager, that the woman in room 107 should be peckish so soon after finishing the hotel’s 14-course tasting menu, a paean to the pig featuring tuna belly with red lard, scallops and pig’s trotters, pork jowl pudding with caviar, and Iberian meatballs with cod tripe that had concluded, inevitably, with chocolate and coffee served with aged ham. ![]()
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