I'm Levy Dalton, and this is all drink to that, where we get behind the scenes of the wine business.

Le Mendoza Akamaso began helping his family in their vineyards in Lamora in the 1940s and still tends to his small parcels of vines there today.

While most of the famous names of his generation have already passed on. Bruno Jacosa, Bepecola, Bartolo Mascarello, Giovanni Contrano, these people have left us.

But Akamaso isn't just still alive, he's still making wine every year, and Akamaso describes himself as a member of the extreme wing of traditional burrolo producers, once telling me that he had never changed anything.

He opts for long-skinned macerations for nebula, large Slovonian oak boaty for aging burrolo, and prefers a long maturation before bottling.

He typically releases wines into the market later than his neighbors, and some of his wines still see an elevage in glass demi-john in keeping with the old custom of the region.

Well, before the pandemic, some friends and I sat with Lorenzo Akamaso in the humble room where he conducts tastings in his home, the meeting was recorded and you will hear it coming up.

It was a visit, not an interview, and so it would be helpful to have some context for what Akamaso says on that tape with an understanding of the events that have happened during his life.

And so for that, we should head down to Abrutso. Specifically to the Grand Saso, the mountain in the Apennines with one of the highest peaks of Italy, and which in September 1943 served as the site of the prison of the fascist Benito Mussolini.

World War II had, by this point, gone very badly for Italy, and in July 1943, the Allies had both bombed Rome and invaded Sicily.

In response, the King of Italy, Vittorio a Manuel III, the person who had originally named Mussolini the Prime Minister in 1922, stripped Mussolini of his powers in 1943 and had him arrested.

In August of 1943, Allied soldiers took control of Sicily and then started moving up the Italian peninsula, but the German infantry had already begun marching into Italy back in June when Mussolini had requested German reinforcements.

With both Allied and German troops already inside his country, the King of Italy, who had been on the Allied side during World War I, declared an armistice with the Allied powers on September 8 of 1943, ending the Italian pact with Germany and the Axis.

Hitler reacted quickly to this news.

The next day, Nazi soldiers moved on Rome, prompting the King to flee that city for the south of Italy where the Allies were located at that time.

The Germans began taking Italian troops prisoner, ultimately disarming close to a million Italian soldiers and sending many to internment camps.

Then, on September 12, German SS troopers landed gliders on the Grand Sosso Mountain and moved on the isolated hotel where 200 Italian guards were holding Mussolini prisoner.

The Germans convinced the Italians to stand down without firing a shot and Bonito Mussolini, who had become the first fascist leader in Europe with his rise to power in the 1920s, was released.

The Nazis would promptly install Mussolini as the head of their fascist puppet state in the north of Italy, the Italian Social Republic.

The King of Italy, for his part, would declare war on Germany in October 1943 and this meant that the Italian people were in multiple wars on their territory simultaneously, a war of occupation and a civil war in addition to what at times had the feeling of a class war.

Without a standing army any longer, the Italian resistance to the German occupation was waged as guerilla warfare by partisans who hid in the mountains or on abandoned farms, often with the support of the surrounding civilian population.

The partisans emerged from different backgrounds and espoused different political ideologies with monarchists, socialists and communists all involved in the resistance.

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