Top wine trading company 'filled vintage bottles with cheap alcohol as part of multimillion pound fraud'

Thousand of British wine connoisseurs have unwittingly been drinking vintage burgundy topped up with cheap table wine under a scam operated by one of France’s most prestigious traders, prosecutors have claimed.

Following an 18-month investigation, police say that merchants Labouré-Roi took bottles of Nuits St George and topped them up with supermarket wines.

Nuits St George was not part of the scam which happened

They were bought by people who thought they were buying Nuits St George vintages that were chateau-produced and, in some cases, prize-winning.

Labouré-Roi, which has been established since 1832, is the Burgundy region's third biggest wine company and sells the drink across the world.

Some of the bottles were also individually numbered wines and the scam is believed to have earned several hundred million pounds.

Some of the cases of wines were being sold for thousands of pounds despite them being topped up with a cheaper wine from the south of France with high alcohol content and available from supermarkets, the police said.