Bitter Aftertaste

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Come in here," says my friend Feri as we stop en route from Marseilles to Hungary at a gas station in northern Italy. "There's something you must see."

Gazing up at me from dozens of wine bottles on the station's shelves is Adolf Hitler, his right arm outstretched in the familiar Nazi salute. Alongside him is a bottle bearing a portrait of SS chief Heinrich Himmler, organizer of the mass murder of 6 million European Jews. Joseph Stalin and Benito Mussolini are there as well, staring out from hundreds of bottles of Merlot, Burgundy, Cabernet Sauvignon and the like — yours for a mere 311. I am aghast. It's not, after all, every day that one is confronted with the opportunity to buy a bottle of wine bearing images of the men who tried to gas his parents.

Führerwein is the marketing stroke of Andrea Lunardelli, a 38-year-old Italian winemaker based in Udine, northern Italy. "We have been selling this kind of wine for more than 10 years," Lunardelli tells me. "Sometimes people get angry with those labels. But we choose them because people want them. It is not Italians that buy these kinds of labels. The majority are German and Austrian." The Historic Line is dominated by Nazi images but also features others, including the Communist Collection with labels of Lenin and Che Guevara.

I ask Lunardelli how he would respond to someone, like me, whose family members were killed or persecuted by the men he uses as a sales gimmick. "We are not against the feelings of this person," he replies. "I am not happy about it. For us it is only marketing. We don't put the swastika on our labels. We have canceled all the swastikas." German law bars any trade using Hitler portraits, swastikas or National Socialist symbols. What is not forbidden is importing Hitler wine for private use.

Péter Zsolt, vice director of the new Budapest Holocaust Museum, says: "It's both sad that it can be sold and even more shocking that people buy it. We are trying to educate people as to how Hungary could get to the point where people were taken to gas chambers. This is exactly how it started, with small human choices. There are things that simply cannot be the object of business." Not so, apparently, for Andrea Lunardelli and his enthusiastic purchasers.