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Monday 4 October 2010

Thieves steal a vineyard-worth of grapes overnight

Harvest time has been and gone - quite literally for Roland Cavaillé. He's a winemaker in the village of Villeneuve-lès-Béziers in southern France.

Cavaillé grows just 10 hectares of grapes and last weekend went along to see how two of the hectares - planted with Cabernet Sauvignon grapes - were doing.

image Cabernet Sauvignon grapes from Wikipedia, Agne27

"I wanted to see not only whether they were ripe enough for harvesting," he told the regional newspaper Midi Libre. "I also wanted to check on the state of the vines themselves."

But Cavaillé was in for a nasty surprise that particular morning, as someone else had been there before him, and harvested the whole two hectares.

The entire crop of Cabernet Sauvignon, totalling around 30 tonnes and valued at €15,000, had been stolen.

A neighbour heard the sound of a harvesting machine in the morning - not so unusual for farmers eager to make an early start - and there were also tyre tracks of a small lorry which had been presumably used to transport the grapes to nobody knows where.

But with a full moon to guide them and the relative isolation of the vineyard, the job of "lifting" the grapes undisturbed made it that much easier for the thieves.

"It has happened before but never to me," he told the national daily Aujourd'hui en France - Le Parisien.

"It's the work of professionals," he added.

"A private person most likely," explaining that it wouldn't be the work of someone supplying the local co-operative as it requires a provenance for all grapes supplied.


Les voleurs vendangent 30 tonnes de raisin en une nuit
envoyé par MCETV. - Gag, sketch et parodie humouristique en video.

"I'm disgusted by what happened," he told Midi Libre.

"We work hard to make ends meet, he said

As national radio Europe 1 reported there's even more bad news because Cavaillé won't see a centime in insurance money even though there's "irrefutable evidence" that a theft occurred.

"We're covered as far as theft of the vines is concerned," he said.

"But not for the grapes."

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

be happy and love. kiss

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