Hong Kong's emerging wine market, spurred by the elimination of import duties last year, is attracting not only oenophiles, it seems, but criminals too.

Police are on the lookout for several men who snuck into a warehouse in the city's New Territories Monday and made off with 228 bottles of 1982 Chateau Lafite Rothschild worth an estimated 6.8 million Hong Kong dollars ($877,000).

China is reputed to possess more of the highly coveted Bordeaux from 1982 than was ever produced that year in France.

Wine imports soared 80 percent in the 12 months after the tax was dropped, in February 2008, to a total of 3.2 billion Hong Kong dollars, according to the Hong Kong Trade Development Council. Mainland China, with a population of 1.3 billion, imported $184 million worth of wine in 2007, though that number reportedly is expected to grow.