Tanker driver siphoned off 1000’s of litres of wine

A 52 year old tanker driver has been arrested after allegedly siphoning off several thousand litres of wine into a basement on his parents’ property near Carcassonne, south west France.
Following a call-out to an altercation two kilometres east of Carcassonne, police found two men fighting in front of a 28,000L (litre) wine tanker parked outside a house with a 30m flexible pipe running from the tanker’s valves into the basement of the house’s garage.
One of the men, from a tanker company based in Montredon-des-Corbières, near Narbonne, more than 60km further east, had confronted one of his drivers outside the house of the driver’s parents.
According to regional newspaper L’Independant,  he had suspected the driver of appropriating hundreds of litres of wine over the course of several months, or possibly years.
Further investigation  found a series of 20L buckets full of wine stored in the basement, plus around 100 buckets hidden outside the garage and more arranged under a tarpaulin on the back of a truck.
The tanker itself was believed to have been topped up with water, the newspaper reported.
Meanwhile Barossa Valley winemaker Trevor Jones has confessed to deliberately destroying 27,000 litres valued at $60,000 of a rival company’s shiraz and chardonnay.
He opened the taps on four tanks of wine at Kellermeister Wines at Lyndoch in February 2015. He faces up to 10 years imprisonment. He will be sentenced next month.