Not every bottle here connects to conflict the same way, and it's worth being specific rather than flattening six different histories into one story.

• Domaine des Tourelles is the most direct connection: founded in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley in 1868, it kept operating through the Lebanese Civil War (1975–1990), even while the Syrian army occupied the valley and, by the family's own account, drank from the cellar without paying for it.
• Skegro farms Žilavka just outside Mostar, the Herzegovinian city whose Stari Most bridge became a symbol of the Bosnian War (1992–1995). The war destroyed vineyards across the region; Skegro's vines were planted in 2005, part of the rebuilding that followed.
• Edgar Brutler's family are Transylvanian Saxons, an ethnic German minority with its own hard 20th-century history: forced labor deportations to the Soviet Union after World War II, then decades of pressure to emigrate under Ceaușescu, which is why the family left Romania in the 1980s. They returned in 1997 to reclaim their land.
• Istria, where Trapan makes its Malvazija, carries a different scar. After World War II, the region passed from Italy to Yugoslavia, and roughly 250,000 ethnic Italians left Istria and Dalmatia in the exodus that followed, a period that also included the foibe killings. Istria itself saw little direct fighting in Croatia's 1991–1995 War of Independence.
• Vojvodina, Sagmeister's home region in northern Serbia, sits far from where most of the 1990s Yugoslav wars were fought, but it absorbed hundreds of thousands of Serb refugees from Croatia and Bosnia and had its own bridges bombed by NATO during the 1999 Kosovo conflict.
• Kakheti, where Chona's Marani makes its Rkatsiteli-Mtsvane blend, wasn't a battlefield in Georgia's more recent conflicts (Abkhazia, South Ossetia, and the 2008 war with Russia), but it sits inside a country that has spent much of the last three decades absorbing the fallout of all three.

"War-torn" means something different in each of these six places. What they share is that the wine kept being made anyway.