Château Petrus billionairess 'reduced to eating rotten meat' by cheating friends

One of the wealthiest women in France, the 95-year-old former owner of the Petrus vineyard near Bordeaux, has been reduced to eating rotten meat after being cheated by her friends and helpers, her nephew alleged yesterday.

A criminal inquiry has been opened into the theft of nearly 1,500 bottles of claret, each worth up to €2,000 (£1,300), belonging to Lily-Paule Lacoste, who was co-owner and manager of Château Petrus for 30 years until two years ago. Two people, described as "close" to her, are in police custody.

The investigation may widen to include a series of financial transactions made in Mme Lacoste's name, including the sale last year of her share of the Petrus vineyard in Pomerol, north-east of Bordeaux and the gift of another Pomerol vineyard, Château Latour, to a charitable foundation.

Her nephew, Guy Lignac, has also complained against unnamed individuals for "abuse of vulnerability, cruelty and ill-treatment". He alleges that his aunt – who was a guest at the Queen and Prince Philip's wedding in 1947 – has been living on "rotten meat and out-of-date tinned food". He claimed that those who controlled her bank accounts had given her next to nothing to live on.

Michel Chasseuil, a vineyard owner in Pomerol who was asked to take over managing her finances in September, said: "People who claimed to be her friends have, little by little, robbed her of everything." Mme Lacoste told the press: "Everything is going wrong ... there's nothing more left for me to do except die. I never wanted to sell anything, and especially not Petrus."

Petrus has risen in the past 50 years from obscurity to being one of the most expensive of all wines. Mme Lacoste, who managed the vineyard for 40 years until she was deposed by her co-owners in 2000, is given much credit for its rise.

The public prosecutor's office in Libourne, near Bordeaux, is investigating "X", or persons unknown, to decide if "people have profited from her by abusing her great age". A judicial source said: "It is a question of whether Mme Lacoste made decisions knowingly or signed documents without understanding what was in them." The investigation follows a complaint by Mme Lacoste that 397 bottles of vintage Petrus, 330 bottles of Château Latour and 750 bottles of Château Lafleur have disappeared from her private cellar.

Before 1939, Petrus was seen as a second-rate claret, not to be compared with the great wines of the Médoc, on the other side of the river Gironde. Lily-Paule Lacoste insisted her wine was good enough to be compared with the best. She began to charge accordingly and generated a mystique, which was magnified by the praise of the American critic Robert Parker.

A legal argument broke out two years ago when Mme Lacoste was deposed and replaced by Jean-François Moueix, the son of the family that co-owned the château. A year later she sold her share of Petrus to the Moueix family.