Antinori Winery Hit by £4.2m Wine Heist as Thieves Target Tignanello and Solaia

Thieves have stolen 30,000 bottles of wine worth approximately €5m (£4.2m) from Marchesi Antinori, one of Italy's most prestigious family-owned wineries, in what the company's chief executive has described as the largest theft of its kind in the nation's history.

The raid took place on Saturday at a storage facility in Tuscany as the company prepared to ship a consignment to customers abroad. At least seven masked men are believed to have deactivated the alarms, disabled the cameras and used company forklifts to load two large trucks with the prized Tignanello, Solaia and Guado al Tasso Tuscan reds.

The theft was only discovered on Monday morning as staff arrived on site. No arrests have been made.

Renzo Cotarella, the chief executive, told the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera that the scale of the operation was unprecedented. "A theft of this scale and value has certainly never occurred in Italy," he said. He expressed hope that authorities would trace the stolen wine, noting that "two trucks full of merchandise can't just disappear into thin air. The Tuscan roads are full of cameras – perhaps with a bit of luck we'll be able to recover at least some of the bottles stolen from us."

Speaking to the Financial Times, Cotarella added: "These wines have a great value and I don't know how they can sell all this wine around the world without being seen."

The company believes the thieves were wine connoisseurs with inside knowledge, given the selection of bottles, which usually sell for between €150 and €500 each.

Marchesi Antinori was founded in 1385 and exports to 170 countries. It reported revenue of €263m (£223m) last year. The incident forms part of a spate of wine thefts across Italy this year, including two in the northern Piedmont region where hundreds of thousands of euros worth of bottles were reportedly taken.