The former US secret agent and wine merchant Peter M. F. Sichel has died. He passed away on February 24 at the age of 102 in his adopted home of New York. In the 1970s and 1980s, he popularized the German white wine cuvée “Liebfraumilch” under the name “Blue Nun” as the first international branded wine.
Peter Sichel was born on September 12, 1922, as the son of a Jewish wine merchant family in Mainz. The company H. Sichel Söhne had been trading in wine since 1856 and had branches in London and Bordeaux. After the rise of the National Socialists, Peter Sichel spent his school years in Great Britain and then began an apprenticeship at Sichel & Fils Frères in Bordeaux.
In 1941, his family managed to escape from France through Spain and Portugal to the USA. There, Sichel worked from 1943 for the foreign intelligence service OSS and its successor organization CIA. In 1945, he returned to Germany as a soldier and led the CIA representation in West Berlin after the end of World War II.
In 1959, he left the intelligence service and took over the wine import H. Sichel Sons in New York, which his uncle had founded in the late 1930s. He initially focused on French wines, especially from Bordeaux. Cuvées played a special role for him.
Sichel’s father had already brought the off-dry German white wine cuvée “Liebfraumilch” to market in the early 1920s and exported it under the name “Blue Nun.” It consisted of Müller-Thurgau, Silvaner, and Gewürztraminer. In the 1960s, Peter Sichel developed a comprehensive marketing campaign for “Blue Nun,” which established the wine in English-speaking markets in Europe and overseas, as well as in Scandinavia and Asia. By the late 1980s, sales figures declined because other branded wines had emerged and wine tastes changed. In 1996, Sichel sold the “Blue Nun” brand to the Mosel winery Langguth Erben; today, the company belongs to the ZGM winery.
Peter Sichel remained in New York and became more involved again in Bordeaux. The family of his cousin Peter Allan Sichel, who passed away in 1998, operates the wine company Maison Sichel there, which includes the Châteaux Palmer and Angludet in Margaux. Peter Sichel’s autobiography “The Secrets of My Three Lives” was published in English in 2015 and in German in 2019.
(cs / VDP / own research)
Dining and Cooking