Italian Wine With Nazi Logo Spurs Boycott Call

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By JTA August 11, 2013

The Simon Wiesenthal Center has called on distributors to boycott Lunardelli, an Italian wine company that sells wine labeled with Nazi and fascist slogans and and photos of the movements’ leaders.

“Enough is enough,” Rabbis Marvin Hier, founder and dean, and Abraham Cooper, associate dean, of the Wiesenthal Center said in a statement released on the center’s website, saying they first protested the marketing of Lunardelli’s ‘Führerwein’ in 1995.

“Now an expanded line of wines that demean, diminish and mock Hitler’s victims are promoted on a slick website,” they wrote. “We reject the cynical notion by the company’s owner that this wine is marketed as ‘a joke gift.’”

Photos on the wine labels include Adolf Hitler, Italy’s Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, Soviet chief Joseph Stalin and other figures.

Heir and Cooper denounced “the marketing of these products” and urged wine distributors “in Italy and around the world to send the only message the owner of this firm might understand—that they choose not to do any business with someone using the Nazi mass murderer as a blatant marketing tool.”

Lunardelli, which was founded in 1967, started labeling wine with pictures of Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, Che Guevara and others in 1995, as part of what it calls a “Historical Series,” and there have been periodic protests over such labeling.

Today, the company’s website states, about half of its bottled wine is marketed in the Historical Series, with more than 50 different labels, many if not most of them dealing with Hitler, Mussolini and Fascism. This, the Lunardelli website states, has made these wines a “cult object among the collectors.”

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