Italian Hitler Wine Bottles ‘Offensive’

Not sure whether to laugh or shake my head at this.

Wine bottles featuring Adolf Hitler on the label have been called “offensive”   after complaints from US tourists in the Italian city of Garda.

Michael Hirsch, a lawyer from Philadelphia, complained to local media after he   found a supermarket near his hotel was stocking wine bottles with Hitler in   various poses and another bottle featuring an image of Pope John Paul II.

“It is very shocking and startling to us,” Mr Hirsch told The Daily   Telegraph on Wednesday. “We would think of it as neo-Nazism It makes   you wonder about the sympathies of the local people.”

One bottle features Hitler with his arm raised in the Nazi, another is   labelled ‘Mein Kampf” and another was labelled “Ein volk, ein   Reich, ein Fuhrer” (one people, one empire, one Fuhrer), Mr Hirsch said.

Wine Freedom Becomes Law, But Wine Lovers Still Limited By Provinces

The good news…

With the stroke of the governor general’s pen, Conservative MP Dan Albas’s bill to eliminate the federal ban on transporting wine across provincial borders became law Thursday.

Shirley-Anne George, with the Canadian Alliance of Wine Consumers, says the prohibition-era rule never made sense to her.

“Can you imagine somebody in France saying that a Parisian could not order a case of wine from Burgundy?” George said. “So why is it acceptable here?”

The bill is especially important for small wineries that want to sell directly to consumers nationally.

The bad news…

There are far more reforms needed to Canadian liquor laws, advocates say, despite a federal change that was meant to make it easier for wine lovers to import the product from other provinces.

Bill C-311, sponsored by B.C. MP Dan Albas, became law on Thursday, making it legal under federal law to take wine from one province to another. But the law specifies that it’s limited according to the law in the province to which the wine is being imported.

Those laws vary, and in some places aren’t at all clear, said Mark Hicken, a lawyer specializing in wine law.

And the bill only addressed wine, not beer or spirits:

There’s a much bigger problem for craft brewers than single consumers crossing borders, said Beauchesne, who is trying to break out of his home province. Beau’s Vankleek Hill, Ont., location is about an hour from Montreal and 20 kilometres from the Quebec border, but it’s been next to impossible to get his beer to restaurants or into the province’s SAQ liquor stores. Different regulations make it difficult for brewers in either province to cross the border.