Wine Label Images Raise Taste Issues

Raffaele Scarano sips his red wine, a satisfied smile breaking out under his thick mustache. It’s not any old table wine he’s drinking, but a special selection with labels bearing images of some of the 20th century’s most despised figures.

Scarano is partial to the label adorned with a picture of his hero, the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini.

Winemaker Alessandro Lunardelli’s “historic line,” which has riled many Italians and foreigners alike, also caters to clients with a taste for Hitler, Stalin or Lenin.

“I am not afraid of saying that I am a fascist,” Scarano, 68, says between sips at a bar on the outskirts of Rome. He is wearing a watch with Mussolini’s face on it and an “Il Duce” key chain.

“I keep 20 bottles of this wine in a showcase at home. I don’t drink them--I just like to look at them,” he says.

The bar, in the town of Acilia, is one of the relatively few distributors of Lunardelli’s line, which includes various images of the Italian dictator and other fascist symbols, as well as a dozen labels bearing Hitler’s image. One is called “Fuhrerwein.”

Lunardelli said he started the line after a customer requested a bottle with Mussolini’s picture on it. A bar owner in the northern city of Bolzano later requested a similar run bearing Hitler’s image.

Six years later, the series now makes up about half of Lunardelli’s 100,000 bottle-a-year production and has expanded to include labels with Stalin, Lenin and Che Guevara. There are also bottles with Napoleon, Winston Churchill and recently the late Jamaican reggae singer Bob Marley.

“It was a great marketing success,” Lunardelli said in a telephone interview from his company’s headquarters near Udine on Italy’s border with Austria. He added that he has begun exporting to Japan.

Jewish groups were outraged when he introduced the Hitler and Mussolini wines.

B’nai B’rith said it was appalled a company would try to make money using someone responsible for the extermination of 6 million Jews.

Jewish organizations in Italy’s northern Alto Adige region filed suit to stop production, citing an Italian law against publicly exalting any leaders or principles of fascism.

Lunardelli won when judges said his company wasn’t “exalting” Mussolini or Hitler by putting their pictures on bottles.

“I understand that Jewish communities can feel hurt by the issue,” Lunardelli said. But he said the line is purely a commercial enterprise that wasn’t designed to make any political statement or endorse the policies of any leaders featured, on the right or left.

The company still receives a steady stream of complaints, he said. Some distributors have reported that customers have torn off labels or smashed bottles in their stores.

But Lunardelli said he keeps finding customers, including Austrians and Germans who cross the border because the wine can’t be sold in their homelands. Laws in both countries forbid the public display of Nazi images, except for educational purposes.