In 2019, thieves bored a hole into a cellar beneath a Paris restaurant and made off with €600,000 worth of wine. Last October, a bottle of Yquem worth £295,000 was among 45 bottles stolen from a resort in Spain. Wine tends to be less well guarded than jewellery, yet it can be just as tempting a target. It may be low priority for the police, but as wine has become more valuable, wine-related crime has been on the rise. The police have no interest Philip Moulin There aren’t many people who can deal with it. The police have no interest.” There are lots of grey areas Questions arise. We need to make sure that if we have any issues with something, it doesn’t come into the business,” says Moulin.

A UV torch reveals hidden flecks of reflective material. Using a magnifying glass, he shows me micro-writing hidden within what look like lines. Moulin shows me some of the dozens of ways to check a wine is real without actually tasting it: from the weight of the bottle to the level of the wine within, watermarks, paper with a unique weave, ink with special DNA, microchips in the bottle. Berry Bros is the first British merchant to employ an authenticator recognition that their reputation is based on trust and that fraudulent wine is a serious problem in the trade. He is the quality and authentication manager at Berry Bros, who in recent years has specialised in helping to check everything the company buys is up to scratch. Moulin, a genial figure who has been into wine since he was a boy, has sometimes been called a “wine detective”. Or at least is, if it is what it claims to be. The liquid in this room is worth hundreds of thousands of pounds, if not more. On one rack lie dusty magnums of Mouton Rothschild 1982, on another a pyramid of golden Château d’Yquem Sauternes. This building has been the wine merchant’s HQ since the company was founded in 1698, and we are in the Holy of Holies, a cellar accessible via fingerprint scanner and several locked gates, where the “directors’ stock” is stored. D own in the cool, dark cellar of Berry Bros & Rudd in St James’s, central London, Philip Moulin arranges some of the world’s most valuable wines on a table.

Counterfeit yellow tail wine