(Bloomberg) - In the early morning hours last Christmas Day, the wine cellar door at Thomas Keller’s French Laundry was pried open with a crowbar. The Napa Valley restaurant has three Michelin stars, a wine list with bottles that cost more than most people’s cars, and an extensive security system that had been conveniently disabled. Even more conveniently, the restaurant had just closed for remodeling and wouldn’t reopen for months, allowing for a leisurely perusal of the cellar’s offerings. Not that the intruders–investigators would determine there were probably more than one–needed much time. They knew exactly what they wanted: 76 bottles of wine worth a collective $300,000. They took a little Dom Pérignon, some cabernet sauvignon from the Napa Valley estate Screaming Eagle, and 63 bottles of Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, one of the most coveted–and expensive–French pinot noirs being made today. DRC, as collectors like to call it, runs as much as $25,000 a bottle. The thieves left without touching anything else. The French Laundry didn’t realize what happened until an employee stopped by the following day.

That night, an hour south, someone also tried, for the second night in a row, to break into Prima, a restaurant and wine store in Walnut Creek, a bedroom community for Oakland and San Francisco commuters. Prima had been targeted twice before. In February 2013, thieves entered its storage room through a skylight and relieved the restaurant of tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of rare Bordeaux and Burgundy wines. They returned a few months later for the restaurant’s DRC, but by then Prima had installed a better alarm system. They dropped through a skylight, set off a motion detector, and ran away, leaving a ladder behind. On Christmas, they failed again–Prima’s alarm went off before they even got in the door.

At first, says Prima co-owner John Rittmaster, “I didn’t know this was a regular thing. I thought it was only happening to us.” But after the second break-in, he started asking around. The Plumed Horse, a Michelin-starred restaurant in Saratoga, one hour south, had also been robbed of tens of thousands of dollars in old Bordeaux and Burgundy. It was a theft so specific that only a wine collector could appreciate it. Redd, an elegant California restaurant just half a mile down the road from the French Laundry, had 24 bottles pilfered from its cellar in January 2014. At Redd, someone had smashed a window and walked right in. “This is not Ocean’s Eleven,” Rittmaster says. “They’re not crawling under laser beams or anything. They’re using sledgehammers and crowbars. But they know what wine they want. This is wine stolen to order.”

The FBI thinks so, too. The agency’s San Francisco bureau has been tracking the crimes for similarities. The thefts usually occur over a holiday, when the targeted restaurant is closed. Only certain types of wine are taken–usually French or Californian, priced at thousands of dollars a bottle. The most commonly stolen wine is DRC. Part of the allure is its scarcity; the French estate makes only a few thousand cases a year and sells them to the U.S. through one importer, Wilson Daniels, which in turn sells only to restaurants and retailers that it considers worthy of the grapes.

"They're using sledgehammers and crowbars. But they know what wine they want. This is wine stolen to order." –John Rittmaster