(NPR) - If you've bought a bottle of nice wine recently, you'll know that the costs have gone up. And the price of really fine wines – the ones that cost at least several hundred dollars – have doubled, tripled and more over the past few years.

As prices rise, so, too, do the number of thefts.

Prima restaurant in Walnut Grove, Calif., has a celebrated wine list, with a number of Bordeauxs and Burgundies that can set you back several thousand dollars. Thieves have successfully targeted those wines several times now.

"The first [time] was February of 2013," says Jon Rittmaster, the co-owner of Prima. "Someone broke through the skylight, dropped a ladder down into our wine storage areas."

"This is not the Ocean's 11 crew," he adds. "These guys are not super-sophisticated." Still, Rittmaster says, thieves managed to get away with tens of thousands of dollars' worth of fine wine.

"Very high-end wine," Rittmaster says. "They really didn't take that much, but what they took was really quite valuable. It was grand theft by any way you measure it. And not only that, the stuff is not really replaceable."

Not surprisingly, Prima fortified its wine storage areas after that robbery. Good thing, because there were three more attempts, including one last Christmas. That one was part of a string of wine robberies at high-end restaurants in Napa Valley and the Bay area. One of the establishments hit was the famed French Laundry — thieves stole $300,000 worth of its premier wines.