Every winery's nightmare as intruder opens storage vats

It is a nightmare scenario for any wine producer.

An intruder - maybe a random nutter - breaks into a winery at night and opens up several tanks in which juice is being stored.

It happened last weekend at the Bodega Cepa 21 winery in the Ribera del Duero region of Spain with thousands of litres of wine with an estimated value exceeding €2m on the ground.

Police from the country’s Guardia Civil were investigating the attack at the winery, outside Valladolid, Decanter.com reported.

CCTV footage that apparently shows the incident has been shared widely by Spanish media and shows a hooded person moving quickly between vats in the cellar and opening them up.

Liquid can be seen spraying out of one vat, in the below YouTube video uploaded by the El Mundo media outlet.

Among the wine lost to the sabotage was around 20,000 litres destined to be bottles of Cepa 21’s high-end Horcajo label, El Pais newspaper quoted winery owner José Moro as saying.

A Cepa 21 representative told BBC News that the saboteur appeared to be familiar with winemaking equipment in general, noting that it took relatively little time to open up the tanks in the cellar.