Winemaker defends Hitler-branded wine bottles: report

• An Italian winemaker has been selling Hitler-themed bottles of wine for over 25 years.
• He told Vice World News that Hitler’s labels are not political and are for customers looking to “remember” history.
• The Hitler wine bottle line will be discontinued, the winemaker said, but not until next year.

An Italian winemaker, whose company has been selling bottles of wine with photographs of Adolf Hitler and Nazi slogans for more than 25 years, defended the controversial products in an interview with Vice World News.

The wine bottles are marked with photographs of the genocidal dictator and Nazi slogans such as “Blut und Ehre” (“Blood and Honour”), “Sieg Heil” (“Hail Victory”) and “Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Führer (“One People, One Kingdom, One Leader”).

The products are banned in Germany and Austria due to laws prohibiting the display of Nazi symbols, but are sold online and in more than 50 Italian stores, Vice World News reported.

Recent media coverage in Germany of the bottles has sparked outrage. Representatives of Jewish communities also expressed their horror. Rabbi Abraham Cooper, director of global social action at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, told Vice World News that the products are a “celebration of evil and genocide.”

Nonetheless, Vini Lunarelli’s Andrea Lunarelli told the outlet that the products weren’t “political”, adding that there was a lot of demand for them.

Lunarelli told Vice World News that Hitler’s wines are “the most requested label” in the historic product line, which includes labels honoring dictators like Joseph Stalin and Francisco Franco. There are a lot of requests from customers, many of them German, British, French, Scandinavian and Russian, he told the outlet.

Lunarelli clarified that he was “absolutely not a Nazi” and suggested that the labels are not anti-Semitic, telling Vice World News that Hitler’s wine bottles are simply for a market that wants to “remember ” Of the history.

“He who buys [the Hitler wine] is a collector, or remembers history, or wants nationalism against current corporate policies…not against Jews,” he said, according to Vice World News.

“Also, Hitler was a teetotaler, so you could even say alcohol and Hitler are a good joke,” Lunarelli continued.

The wine will eventually be discontinued, Vice World News reported, but not until early 2023. This coincides with when Lunarelli takes over the business from his father, the outlet said.

He told Vice World News that the product would be discontinued because he was fed up with the controversy surrounding it, not because he was giving in to pressure.