The dishevelled woman who shuffled, legs in shackles, into Clark County General District Court in Virginia this week did not convey the impression of a high-flying businesswoman or wine aficionado.

Natali Ray’s slumped shoulders and blue-grey prison jumpsuit were a far cry from the cultured customer with the cut-glass accent and silk scarf who strolled into the L’Auberge Provencale two weeks ago, showing a particular interest in the family-owned hostelry’s impeccably stocked wine cellar – before allegedly trying to make off with £31,500 worth of fine vintage stock.

The British-born mother of three did not make it off the restaurant’s grounds before she was detained and arrested.

And as she appeared in court this week over the attempted theft it emerged there may be even more to this 56-year-old from the quaint seaside town of Herne Bay in Kent than it seems.

For not only is she not a cultured expat, in the employ of a wealthy businessman and wine enthusiast, as she told the restaurant owner, as the Daily Mail can exclusively reveal, she may have been involved in other targeted thefts of a highly prized French wine.

The ‘£31,500 wine heist’, as the latest theft has been dubbed, could have come from Hollywood scriptwriters – involving disguises, an adapted ‘swag coat’ and a high-speed car chase in a customer’s Porsche.

The booty? Six bottles of pinot noir from the Domaine de la Romanée-Conti (known as DRC), a small, but highly-prized vineyard in Burgundy – four of which are still missing, one of which is valued at £18,000.

Only 5,000 bottles of DRC flagship pinot noir are produced each year and oenophiles pay handsomely for the privilege of owning one.

In 2018, two bottles of a 1945 vintage became the most expensive wines ever sold at auction when they fetched £424,000 and £377,000 respectively, at Sotheby’s New York.

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Natali Ray’s slumped shoulders and blue-grey prison jumpsuit were a far cry from the cultured customer with the cut-glass accent and silk scarf who strolled into the L’Auberge Provencale two weeks ago

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The British-born mother of three did not make it off the restaurant’s grounds before she was detained and arrested

There is a booming blackmarket, too. In 2020 French authorities recovered 900 stolen bottles of fine wine, many from the DRC estate, valued at £4.5million and arrested 24 people linked to a wine theft ring.

The wine list at L’Auberge Provencale, a little slice of Provence, as its name suggests, in the U.S. wine county of northern Virginia, does not run to those kinds of figures, but it does boast 1280 carefully curated varieties, all well documented online.

So when a well-dressed couple – the woman wearing a trench coat and silk scarf – arrived there on November 19, claiming to represent their boss, who wanted to enquire about hosting a 25-person dinner in a private room – with plenty of fine wine – management were only too happy to oblige.

The couple, who in retrospect sported distinctively bouffant matching hairstyles (his grey, hers brunette), were particularly interested to explore the inn’s cellars.

The woman, who gave her name as ‘Stephanie Baker’, spoke with a crisp and distinctive English accent and was concerned to know how the wine was stored.

‘I want to make sure it’s climate-controlled,’ she told Christian Borel, a sommelier, whose parents bought the business 45 years ago.

It was a well-pitched request.

As Christian’s mother, co-owner Celeste Borel, said: ‘We’ve been collecting wine for decades, and we’re very proud of it. We love showing people our wine cellar, it’s one of the most special parts of who we are.’

How the Borels regret their hospitality now.

For barely half an hour after walking into the inn the couple were making a dash for their car with six bottles of vintage wine, hidden inside an apparently specially-designed compartment within the male visitor’s coat. The genial Christian, who took the couple to the cellar, gave the Daily Mail a tour of his highly prized shelves this week.

He squeezed through narrow aisles stacked high with wine and explained how he was tricked.

‘If they had asked directly for the Domaines de la Romanee-Conti, it would have been a red flag,’ he says. ‘So instead she was asking me things like, ‘Is this all your French wine? Where is the American wine?’

Gesturing to the separation between the shelves, Borel explained: ‘While I was round here, that’s when he stole the wine. I heard a chink but I didn’t think anything of it; I bump into bottles all the time, but that must have been him moving the wine.’

He pauses for a moment. ‘She was so convincing, she seemed so proper.’

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Ray may also have been involved in other targeted thefts of a highly prized French wine

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This is the moment a Ray allegedly posed as a wealthy wine connoisseur to steal £30,000 of fine wine

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CCTV captured the couple being led through three dining rooms and into the cellar

Just as Borel was showing a bottle of Californian cabernet the man reappeared and said: ‘Everything’s great, but we really have to go.’ And off they went.

By now a thoroughly suspicious Borel noticed the man’s unusual gait, so dashed back down the stairs and discovered an array of screw top bottles of plonk where the DRC had been.

Cue his cries for help.

A patron at the bar put down his Old-Fashioned cocktail to join the chase. They managed to stop Ray, but her sidekick was able to shrug off his pursuers and after a hair-raising tussle (ignition on, tyres spinning) he managed to flee.

It was at this point matters became even more bizarre. The cocktail drinker, who’d parked his Porsche outside, jumped in his car with the waiter and gave chase, zooming down the highway in hot pursuit until the Porsche was hit by another car.

Two bottles of wine – a 2019 Echézeaux and a 2021 Grands Echézeaux – were found intact on the ground, but four others remain missing.

It was not only an elaborate scam but one which another wine expert in Florida says was eerily reminiscent of what happened in his shop in April last year. For the Daily Mail can now reveal police are probing whether Ray and her alleged accomplice may be the perpetrators of an earlier, strikingly similar deception, involving a £20,000 bottle of the very same wine.

The CCTV images of the couple involved in the Florida theft are striking in their similarity: a woman wearing a silk scarf, wearing what appears to be a wig and bearing an uncanny resemblance to Ray, with a grey-haired man wearing a flat cap and a large moustache.

On this occasion, the woman spoke to a member of staff, while the man slid the pricey bottle of wine under his checked shirt. The wine in question? A 2020 bottle of Domaine de la Romanée-Conti Grand Cru.

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Ray’s alleged accomplice is said to have taken eight bottles before replacing them with decoy bottles of cheap plonk

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Meanwhile, Ray was alleged to be deliberately distracting staff with her back story about a possible lucrative booking

In an extraordinary twist of fate, an employee from the Florida wine shop was visiting L’Auberge in the aftermath of the heist and remarked on the similarity with what had unfolded more than a year previously at his own workplace.

In Florida, the shop owner looked at CCTV footage from Virginia.

‘I’m convinced this was the same couple as the Virginia job,’ the owner of the store told the Daily Mail. ‘They operated in the same way and both wore wigs. The woman who robbed my store spoke with an English accent and said that she was putting on an event for her boss and needed some expensive wine.

‘Somebody must have come in beforehand because they knew exactly what they were looking for.

‘While the woman distracted the staff the man went to another area of the store and stole a bottle of DRC.

‘They were so slick and my staff didn’t even realise it had happened. There’s more going on here than we realise and I think we’re just starting to scratch the surface’.

When the Daily Mail sent Christian Borel a clear image of the male suspect in Florida, he laughed when he saw it and said: ‘That’s him for sure. With a crappy moustache!’

The identity of the man, who is yet to be found, is still unknown. And whether Natali Ray is the woman in both heists is yet to be determined.

But just how a freelance writer and former hotelier, who waved her daughter off to university this year and was strolling around Chelsea Flower Show only this summer, became caught up in this scandal is even more of a puzzle.

Charged with grand larceny, conspiracy to commit grand larceny and defrauding an innkeeper – crimes for which, if convicted, she faces up to 50 years in prison – Ray did not speak in court this week, only nodding her head to indicate she understood as prosecutor Matthew Bass told those present it was a ‘complicated’ case and a ‘planned heist’.

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Ray and the man are seen getting into their vehicle as they leave the estate

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Mr Borel can be seen chasing after Ray and the man after realising the bottles had gone missing

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Ray (pictured) could now face as much as 50 years in jail having been charged with grand larceny and other offences following the alleged theft

What a contrast her current cell is to her jet-set existence in recent years. Her Instagram account, on which she goes by the name Tea Ray, boasts jaunts to an array of glamorous destinations.

On November 17 (two days before the Virginia heist) she shared a video from Miami, Florida. There are multiple trips to other destinations in the USA, more than one to France, multiple to Serbia (her parents’ homeland), Croatia, Italy and Tanzania – all apparently in just the past two years.

The foreign travels have been punctuated by visits to the British Museum, to Oxford, to Winchester and outings to five star Shangri-La at the Shard, the Connaught’s exclusive cocktail bar, Sketch and The Ivy Tower Bridge. A woman, it seems, with expensive tastes.

When arrested at the scene of the Virginia crime, Ray, a divorcee who has apparently never been on the wrong side of the law before, tearfully insisted her mystery companion was someone she had met on a cruise, who had abducted her and forced her into the heist.

At the slightly run down Regency-era former hotel in Herne Bay which Ray still calls home, a young man told the Daily Mail: ‘She told me she was going to America to live her life and have a nice time.’

But among neighbours and her wider family a perplexing picture of the woman at the centre of the great wine heist of northern Virginia grew.

First a neighbour at the six-bedroom property, which once featured in the television series Little Britain, says that Ray, who has been looking after her elderly mother, is unwell.

‘She’s a very sick lady,’ she said. ‘The prognosis is not great, it’s a chronic illness. I don’t want to go into more detail than that. The chances of seeing her again are slim because of her health condition.’

But could she be a master of deception? Another neighbour described the alleged theft as ‘totally out of character’.

‘I fear her good nature has been her downfall; she can too easily see the good in people. She often lives on a pink cloud where everything is perfect. But of course it is not.’

There is mystery too about when Ray went away and for how long. ‘She told her son she was going to America,’ says the neighbour. ‘But he didn’t seem to know how long for. He said she just said she wanted a break.’

In Leicester, where Ray grew up, a family member tells the Daily Mail they have all been blindsided.

‘We don’t know a thing about it,’ says the relation. ‘This is very much out of character. It is such a silly thing to do, if she has.’

The relation says the family thought Ray was going on a cruise to celebrate a female friend’s 60th birthday.

That Ray was present as the heist unfolded appears in no doubt. As to conviction, the case has been adjourned until February 11. There was no reference to any health issues when she appeared in court.

The recovered two bottles of wine are, for the time being, in the care of police. Of the missing bottles there is one lost gem, a 2020 Romanee-Conti – ‘the perfect pinot noir’, which, says Borel, ‘could be anywhere’.

‘They are probably gone already,’ says Borel. ‘Some rich guy in Hong Kong, Singapore, London. If they pay two thirds of the price they are going to think, ‘I’m getting a great deal’.’

He’s given the serial numbers for the lost bottles to auction houses. But with a booming black market for high-end wine, he is not optimistic.