Peter Sichel poses for a portrait on December 18, 1972. (Photo by Fairchild Archive/WWD/Penske Media … [+] via Getty Images)
Penske Media via Getty Images
Peter M.F. Sichel, famed as a wine merchant and authority on German wines, died at the age of 102 on February 24, 2025. Had he only been known within wine circles as a charismatic connoisseur, he would stand in the top ranks of international merchants and authors like Hugh Johnson, Michael Broadbent and Gerald Asher. But his once secret life as a spy in Berlin for the CIA, which he detailed in his autobiography, The Secrets of My Life (2016), was only another of many facets of a man who lived a very long and extraordinary life.
Not until he was in his nineties did Peter Sichel write his memoirs.
Archway Publishing
Those knew him valued his immense knowledge of wine, acquired over nine decades in the trade, but also his wry affability, wit and as a masterful raconteur who could boast of a life that included being born a German Jew in Mainz in 1922, growing up in his grandfather’s wine business, an education on England and his capture in World War II by the Germans while working in Bordeaux. He escaped and made his way to Portugal and Spain before joining the U.S .Army, whose Office of Strategic Services trained him to employ German POWs to become spies against their own country. By 1946 he was in Berlin reporting on Soviet interference in East Germany, then joined the CIA, serving in Berlin, Washington and Hong Kong until 1960.
Countess Jane Von Sponeck, at the Castlereagh Hotel, City, promoting Blue Nun wines. May 27, 1981. … [+] (Photo by Paul Stephen Pearson/Fairfax Media via Getty Images).
Fairfax Media via Getty Images
But that was just a beginning for Sichel, who took over his family’s wine business and appointed the Schieffelin Company, a liquor importer and distributor, to import a German white wine called Blue Nun, which by the 1980s reached sales of 1.25 million cases in the U.S. and 3 million cases worldwide. It was a semi-sweet blend of Muller-Thurgau, Sylvaner and Gewürztraminer called “Liebfraumilch.”
Peter Sichel’s The Wines of Germany was the first authoritative book on the subject in English.
Hastings House
Multilingual, Sichel was the brand’s international ambassador, and his books, Which Wine: The Wine Drinker’s Buying Guide (1975), co-written with Judy Ley; The Wines of Germany (1980); and his memoir. which he wrote at the age of 90, secured his reputation as one of the most authoritative, candid and easy-to-read bon vivants in the world of wine.
I knew Sichel’s wines before I knew Peter Sichel. In college everyone’s first wines were either jug wines like Carlo Rossi or, for the slightly more worldly, Mateus Rosé, Ruffino Chianti and Blue Nun, with its easy to recognize label of pretty grape-picking nuns in blue habits––wholly different from the indecipherable labels of German bottlings at the time.
Later on, in my formative years as a wine writer, I finally met Peter and found him the epitome of the affable European connoisseur straight out of an Evelyn Waugh story. Wholly without pretension, he never seemed to take wine quite so seriously as his far less experienced colleagues. He had a faint accent and a slight British lilt in his voice that made you think he should have had a “von” in front of “Sichel.” Had someone cast him in a movie, the actor would most likely be Paul Henreid, who played a highly civilized spy in the film Casablanca. Indeed, given his experience, I always wondered why Peter had never tried to write a John le Carré’s spy novel, which might have been titled, The Spy Who Came Up from the Wine Cellar.
The old adage “May you be fortunate to live in interesting times” was certainly the case in Peter Sichel’s long life, and he was one who made them all the more interesting for those lucky enough to have known him.