FROM THE WEB
 
Butterflies and Trenches - Stories from Afghanistan, by chance and for love article by Piotr

[...] Another story that I found amazing is that of Tonino de Feo, from Foggia transplanted to Piedmont and creator of a distillery in Kabul (actually not the first). Completely lacking in experience in the sector, Tonino discovers the Afghan grape and decides that it is too good not to make it alive, hence a series of events that seem to have come out of the pages of a novel. But basically not seeing life as a novel makes everything much uglier. The events of De Feo are at times hilarious, although associating Afghanistan and laughter to many could seem something sacrilegious. [...]  OPEN THE LINK

In battle, when the grapes are ripe. Forty years of Afghanistan by Valerio Pellizzari

[...] An Italian vintner for ten years produces two million bottles of wine a year. [...]
[...] The Kabul winery belongs to the felix legends of Afghanistan: authentic and at the same time fantastic, but which today it is difficult to believe. In that building the white grapes from Pagman and the red ones from Turan, around Kandahar, were mixed and transformed. The vineyards, which had always contented themselves with supplying raisins for the bazaar, had since found new vitality. The wine factory was born in 1967, had grown happily for a decade, and had begun to decline before the Communist Revolution and the Red Army.
The crusade in Islamic land to spread wine, vermouth, bitters, sparkling wine, grappa, cognac, gin and other spirits, had only one protagonist, the Italian Tonino De Feo. Born in Foggia, emigrated to Piedmont, a seminary student for some time, interested in the iron and steel trade, one day in 1965 he landed in Kabul, after having climbed with a bulky Buick car on the hairpin bends of the Khyber Pass. And this was already a sign of recklessness, in those districts of marauders. He discovered that in that country a very sweet grape was growing, rich in a hundred different qualities. He was totally ignorant of oenology, but he was an imaginative pioneer, determined and at the same time unconscious. In Kabul, a UN project lay in a drawer, together with many others that would remain only on paper, destined for the "Exploitation of local grapes for the production of wines and various spirits".
De Feo made up his mind quickly. He returned to Italy and went to study diligently the transformation of the grapes into wine every day. [...]  OPEN THE LINK

microMacro - Michele Lula's Kabul vintner

No one will ever be able to conquer them by force. "He did so, but only because he was able to win the hearts of a people who saw their" paradise "profoundly changed, which remained so only until the 1960s.  OPEN THE LINK