Our 6,000 missing wines — and what we thought about Neal’s Yard cheese ‘heist’

W hen Stefan Hauser, a vintner, read about the alleged theft of £300,000 worth of cheese from an artisan dairy in London, his jaw dropped. Hauser and his father, Johannes, together run a wine merchant in Switzerland and Germany, supplying restaurants and private owners. Last year they had 6,500 bottles of German red wine stolen.

Like the cheese, the wine order was delivered to a warehouse, after the company was approached by a buyer claiming to represent a large French chain, who had “good knowledge” of the product. After the wine was handed over in Paris, it disappeared, and so did the buyer without transferring the money. “I follow Jamie Oliver on social media and saw he had posted about the cheese being stolen in the UK,” Hauser, 42, said.

“It made me very angry.”.