Latest news with #BlueNun
The Irish Sun
16-05-2025
- Lifestyle
- The Irish Sun
Lidl's three-star €7.99 ‘super summer sipper' Rosé that's perfect for BBQs & SuperValu's €10 ‘fresh & zippy' white wine
JUNE is still a fortnight away, but the smell of charcoal burning has been wafting over neighbours' fences for some weeks now. Yes, the Advertisement 5 Matthew Nugent has shared his perfect BBQ tips Credit: Getty We take it that you have mastered the art of outdoor Let me introduce you to my BBQ golden rules (sort of). If you follow them, I can almost promise you a fun-filled and enjoyable event. Those not too expensive, light and fruity numbers are the way to go, and there are plenty of wines out there priced at under €10 that will be more than adequate. Even at this price point you will find some unusual grape varieties or blends. Advertisement READ MORE IN FABULOUS So, don't be afraid to go outside your comfort zone and include a few bottles of something a little different. Such an adventurous move will impress the more serious wine drinkers at your barbie. You could go a little further, spend a fraction more, and pick up a couple of bottles of natural or orange wines. These will certainly have your guests queueing up to try them. Advertisement Most read in Fabulous Natural wines are made with as little intervention as possible and without the use of sulphites. Orange wines are actually whites that have been made using red wine fermentation processes. Jose Mourinho launches new side hustle alongside Fenerbahce job as John Terry vows to be first customer The wine remains in contact with the skins and develops a different taste profile, and an orange hue. Either of these exciting styles could well steal the show at your barbecue. Advertisement Do not be tempted to pour large measures. Remember, your average beer comes in at around 4.5 per cent alcohol by volume (ABV) while a glass of wine will be an average 12-14 per cent ABV. TRYING NEW PAIRINGS So go easy on those pours - and don't use your best glassware. This is meant to be a fun event so there could well be a glass or two broken. Finally, it is a barbecue and meant to be fun. Traditional rules for pairing food and wine – reds with red meat and whites with fish - are fine but not absolute. Advertisement What makes pairing fun is trying new pairings. Go for it, and you will enjoy it more if you drink in moderation. FIRST CHOICE THE first wine I ever purchased in a Dublin restaurant was a bottle of Black Tower – almost half a century ago! The white choice was limited: Blue Nun, Le Piat d'Or or Black Tower. The sleek black bottle of the latter was always my first choice. So, I'm taking something of nostalgic walk back to 1975 this week and sipping from a new range of Black Tower wines, with a snazzy makeover – and perfect for For the moment their Fruity White, Sylvaner Pinot Grigio and Riesling wines are currently available at All are reasonably light on Domaine De La Chauvinière Muscadet Sevre-et-Maine 2022 (ABV 12%) 5 Currently €11.95 @ O'Briens Wine Grape: Melon-de-Bourgogne Advertisement THE Huchet Crafted from fruit gathered off old vines, the wine has a light lemon colour, and delivers citrus and ripe pear aromas. Time on the lees (spent yeast cells), adds weight to a crisp and zesty palate with good acidity, plenty of citrus notes, with a honeyed lift and saline finish. Enjoy with: Anything from the sea, particularly oysters. Advertisement Star rating: **** Sherwood Estate Pinot Noir 2022 (ABV 13.5%) 5 Currently €21.95 @ O'Briens Wine Grape: Pinot Noir Advertisement SILKY smooth Pinot from the Sherwood family's vineyards at Waipara Valley on A bright, clear pale garnet colour, it has heady floral and red berry (strawberry and raspberry) fruit aromas, with a light sprinkling of spice. The palate is supple with softened tannins and lashings of raspberry and plum fruit. The lingering finish has a nice oaky note. Chill slightly. Advertisement Enjoy with: Pork medallions in a cream sauce. Star rating: **** Black Tower Club Edition Sauvignon Blanc 2024 (ABV 12%) 5 Currently €10 at SuperValu outlets Advertisement Grape: Sauvignon Blanc FRESH and zippy Sauvignon Blanc from the cool climate Palatinate region in southwest With a light lemon/lime colour when poured, it has satisfying aromatics of cut grass, stone fruit and a wisp of minerality. The light but pleasing palate has balanced acidity, with notes of passion fruit and grapefruit. Reasonable length. Advertisement Enjoy with: Salads, grilled seafood. Star rating: *** THIS WEEK'S BARGAIN BOTTLE OUR promise is to bring Irish Sun wine lovers a taste-tested wine each weekend for under a tenner. The cost of glass, packaging, labelling and transport have sky-rocketed in recent years. Advertisement So, finding excellent value tipples is getting harder - but we have sourced some great wines and will bring you a super sipper recommendation every weekend. Pays d'Oc Gris Rosé 2022 (ABV 12%) 5 Currently €7.99 @ Lidl outlets Grape: Grenache Advertisement WE are gearing up for our eagerly-awaited Rosé fortnight in June, and as samples have begun to arrive for tasting, I came across the super Summer sipper. A pale pink, with characteristic Grenache aromas of soft red fruits on the nose. The palate is clean and nicely crisp, with good acidity and a wisp of raspberry and strawberry notes on a very satisfying finish. Enjoy with: Cold meats, or salads at your barbie. Advertisement Star rating: ***
Telegraph
11-03-2025
- General
- Telegraph
Keir Starmer must be prepared to stand his ground on welfare reform
SIR – I greatly enjoyed reading about the fascinating life of Peter Sichel (Obituaries, March 6), who popularised Blue Nun wine in the 1970s. About 18 years ago, I enrolled on Michael Schuster's excellent wine-tasting course, which he ran from his house in Islington. It was aimed at complete beginners, but we were a mixed group that included people with good knowledge of wine, as well as a young man who worked in a restaurant and was hoping to train as a sommelier. About halfway through the course, after Michael had taught us how to identify key basic tastes in wine – alcohol, acidity, dryness/sweetness, bitterness – he set us a simple blind tasting of some white wines, and asked us to choose which one we thought was most balanced. The majority of us chose the same wine, at which point Michael took mischievous delight in removing the cover from the bottle, revealing it to be Blue Nun. The class erupted into groans and laughter. However, as Michael cheerfully explained to a roomful of red faces, it was an important lesson in 'wine snobbery'. While Blue Nun was by no means a great wine, it was nevertheless a 'well-made' one. I imagine the young man in the class went on to make a fine career for himself as a sommelier. He was the only person who didn't choose the Blue Nun. Kate Quill London W14 SIR – As a teenager in the 1960s, I drank beer when I went out. My parents would serve gin and tonic or sherry to their guests. There came a time, however, when I would be invited to events where it was more appropriate to bring wine. I brought Blue Nun, as it was the only one I had heard of, and I would not be the only guest to do so. I now realise that I learnt about this wine because of the brilliant advertising by Peter Sichel, who must have done more than anyone to introduce the concept of drinking wine to the middle classes in this country.
Telegraph
09-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Will Blue Nun and Ferrero Rocher ever escape the taint of naffness?
As the spring sunshine falls on the dust and smears of winter, minds turn to spring cleaning – but not for long. Soon, like Mole in The Wind in the Willows, we may find ourselves saying 'Hang spring cleaning!' and heading for more convivial pursuits. Perhaps we could invite the neighbours round for a meal. But then there comes the question of what to make. Television shows such as MasterChef and Come Dine With Me have turned cookery into an extreme sport with a rich potential for humiliation. And like all the performing arts, food is subject to trends that change with capricious speed. Those once cherished totems of aspirational 1970s dining, prawn cocktail, chicken Kiev and baked Alaska, became objects of derision for decades before their current rehabilitation on the dinner tables of fashionable foodies, well-seasoned with cheffy irony. Last week The Telegraph published obituaries of two brilliant innovators who created products that traced an ignominious trajectory from aspirational to naff. Francesco Rivella, who died last month aged 97, was an Italian chemist (and friend of the chemist and author Primo Levi) who joined the confectionary firm of Ferrero, where he helped devise such globally popular delicacies as the chocolate spread Nutella and the knobbly, gold-wrapped bolus, Ferrero Rocher. Sixty years after the first jar was sold, the appetite for Nutella remains as keen as ever. But Ferrero Rocher is indelibly associated, at least in Britain, with the notorious 1990s 'ambassador's reception' television commercial. Featuring an elderly white-gloved butler handing around a pyramid of Rochers at an Embassy party, with the punchline 'Monsieur, wizz zeez Rocher you're really spoiling us', the ad became a kitsch icon. So, alas, did the chocolates. A 2003 remake by the filmmaker Martha Fiennes replaced the old retainer with a dashing younger model, but (perhaps unsurprisingly in a nation whose collective ear is so finely attuned to the social aspirations of Hyacinth Bucket and Margo Leadbetter) it failed to erase the indelible aura of comedy that surrounds Ferrero Rocher as firmly as its gold foil wrapping. Peter Sichel, who died aged 102, 10 days after Rivella, had an even more remarkable career. Born into a German Jewish wine-making family, he served with the US army during the war and later joined the CIA. In 1960 he returned to the family wine-making business and began an astonishingly successful campaign to promote Blue Nun in Britain and the US. Social anxiety played a role here, too. In markets where wine wasn't an everyday drink, the reassuring tagline: 'The delicious white wine that's correct with any dish', increased US sales by 500 per cent. The wine became embedded in popular culture, providing impromptu percussion on the Beatles' White Album, and appearing in Jonathan Coe's novel, The Rotters' Club. But as consumers became more fluent in winespeak, Blue Nun became a comic shorthand for lack of sophistication, its decline epitomised when Steve Coogan's hapless character, Alan Partridge, ordered a bottle at lunch with a BBC executive. With global wine consumption down 12 per cent since 2007, and vineyards being replanted with more profitable olive trees, a renaissance in the fortunes of Blue Nun seems unlikely. But the inexorable churn in food fashion continues. In troubled times our appetites turn from the exotic to old favourites. Data from the pandemic recorded a sharp rise in sales of instant mash, stock cubes and – of all things – suet. As global instability suggests a return to comfort food (Steve Coogan predicts 'a resurgence of white pepper' – a taste he shares with the great Simon Hopkinson), what fashionable comestibles might we consign to the recycling bin? Personally, I'd be happy to see the disappearance of salted caramel anything, along with the ubiquitous worms of cacio e pepe, and small plates – those stingy restaurant elevations of generous bar snacks (tapas, cicchetti) into an indigestible approximation of a meal. But even if they were to vanish, the chances are that eventually, they'd be back. As the film critic David Thomson remarked of Beverley's supposedly gauche (but now quite acceptable) chilling of a bottle of Beaujolais in Mike Leigh's play, Abigail's Party, 'the gaffe has turned suave'.
Yahoo
06-03-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Peter Sichel, refugee from Nazis who made Blue Nun the must-have table wine of the 1970s
Peter Sichel, who has died aged 102, was a German Jewish émigré to the US who oversaw postwar CIA activities in Eastern Europe and the Far East until, disillusioned, he resigned to take over his family's wine import business. Sichel re-invented himself as America's most persuasive salesman of table wine, but he was probably most often identified as the man who made Blue Nun one of the most popular wines in the world. At its peak in 1985, 30 million bottles of the slightly sweet German white wine – its label featuring a smiling nun, sometimes several nuns, holding baskets of grapes in a vineyard – were sold. It was his great-grandfather, Hermann Sichel, a Jewish wool merchant from Mainz, who founded the family wine négociant business in 1857, bottling and marketing a blend of regional wines known generically as Liebfraumilch. In the 1920s Sichel sought to export these wines, especially to Great Britain, and the Blue Nun label, featuring nuns of a severe mien, was invented to facilitate sales abroad. One source holds that the nuns were originally clad in brown habits, but a printer's error turned them blue. When Peter took charge of the family wine business in 1960, Blue Nun was a faltering brand. He set about promoting the wine, changing the label to make the nuns younger looking and more cheerful, and travelled the world to market the brand as 'the wine that will go with everything' to a public unschooled in the world of wine. In the US a memorable series of radio ads in the 1970s featured the young married comedy duo Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara bantering about life and a wine from Germany with an unlikely name. 'Blue Nun, the delicious white wine that's correct with any dish,' ran the tagline. The ads were so effective they boosted US sales by 500 per cent. In the 1970 and 1980s Blue Nun, closely followed by other branded wines such as Le Piat d'Or and Mateus Rosé, were staples of middle-class dinner parties. Connoisseurs had always been sniffy about Blue Nun's rather cloying sweetness, however, and by the 1990s the brand had become a byword for naffness. When the writers of the TV comedy I'm Alan Partridge wanted to choose the most embarrassing wine for the hapless hero to order over an important lunch with 'Tony Hayers', chief commissioning editor of the BBC, there could be no better choice. As the lunch goes badly wrong, however, Alan starts to imagine grotesque scenes in which he gyrates on a stage in a leather posing pouch in front of Hayers, who is laughing hysterically and screaming 'Blue Nun!' while holding a bottle. Peter Max Ferdinand Sichel was born in Mainz on September 12 1922, to Eugen Sichel and his wife Franziska, née Loeb, and grew up in a five-storey mansion, surrounded by servants. 'We were part of a big, closely-knit family who lived on the same street and my parents did lots of entertaining,' he said. 'Because I was forbidden to attend the dinner parties, I was naturally curious about the wonderful smells emanating from the kitchen.' He recalled, aged six, sneaking down to the kitchen to visit the family cook, Bertha: 'I'd help her make mayonnaise and thick, mealy German pancakes and delicate rosehip and quince jelly, and other marvellous things.' By the late 1920s the family company, H Sichel Söhne, sold wine throughout Germany and exported it, as well as importing wine from France, and had outposts in London, New York and Bordeaux. When the Nazis came to power Peter's parents, seeing the way the wind was blowing, sent Peter and his older sister Ruth to England, where, aged 14, Peter enrolled at Stowe, the headmaster insisting that he changed the pronunciation of his name from 'seashell' to 'sitchel' to make it sound less German. His parents, however, were unable to obtain an exit visa because the family business was considered too vital to the German export trade. They finally escaped in 1938, by telling the authorities that their daughter was dying of meningitis in England. The ruse worked, but their property in Germany was confiscated. They fled to Bordeaux, where Peter and his sister joined them in 1939, but when Germany invaded Poland and war was declared, they were arrested by the French authorities as enemy aliens and sent to internment camps. When Germany invaded France, Peter's father was able to persuade a camp official to free them, arguing that, as the Sichels were Jews, they were unlikely to be sympathetic to the Nazis and would be in danger if the Germans arrived. Making their way to the Pyrenees, they found shelter in a château and Peter worked as a farm hand. A relative in New York managed to get visas for the family, as well as transit visas through Spain and Portugal, and in March 1941 they left for Lisbon, where they boarded a steamer. Arriving in New York in April 1941, they settled in the Queens district and Peter found work with a shoe supply company until the December 1941 bombing of Pearl Harbor, when he volunteered for the US Army. Because he spoke fluent French and German he was sent to Algiers to collect intelligence, and in 1943 was recruited into the newly-formed Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the CIA's precursor. After landing in southern France, Sichel's job was to interrogate German prisoners of war and recruit spies for the Allies, infiltrating them back into the German army on the Western front, reckoning that, during the fog of war, their absence could easily be explained away. 'There was great camaraderie among our team and a feeling that we were doing something useful,' Sichel recalled. 'Like all wars, there were periods of long, hard work followed by periods of inactivity where we played bridge or chess. We had assured ourselves of a good cook, and I used the family connections to buy wine in Burgundy.' At one point Ernest Hemingway's flamboyant son Jack, who had parachuted into occupied France with fly rod, reel and flies, was sent to the front to assist Sichel's operations, only to be taken prisoner by the Germans, Sichel recalling him as 'the most beautiful, dumbest man I ever met.' In February 1945, Sichel managed to be assigned to the US troops scheduled to liberate his hometown of Mainz: 'My big concern was to prevent them from liberating and looting any wine that might be left. I felt very strange coming home. Our big house, built in 1876, was in ruins... But, by a miracle, the family wine cellar was left intact – about 1,333,000 bottles of Blue Nun contained in bulk barrels. They were declared off-limits to US troops, a vintage treasure which to me tasted very fine that year.' When the war was over he was sent to Berlin and by December 1945, was heading up operations in Berlin. In early 1946 he reported on the methods the Soviets were using to control political parties in the Russian sector of Germany. He remained in Berlin after the OSS was dissolved and replaced by the CIA, his responsibilities including investigating Soviet nuclear capabilities and tracking German war criminals and scientists. In 1951 he was involved in the approval process for 'Operation Gold' the $25 million joint operation by the CIA and MI6 to tap into Soviet cable lines in East Berlin by digging a tunnel under the Soviet sector. The operation eventually got underway in 1954. However it eventually transpired that George Blake, a member of MI6's Section Y involved in secret meetings to discuss progress, was a Soviet spy and that Moscow had known about the tunnel from the start. Sichel returned to the US in 1952 as head of the CIA's Eastern Europe operations. In 1956 he was posted to Hong Kong to keep an eye on the Communist-Nationalist war in China and the rise of Communism in Southeast Asia. As Cold War paranoia set in, however, and the US government under President Eisenhower shifted the CIA's focus from intelligence gathering to covert operations Sichel became increasingly disillusioned. He was particularly dismayed by the agency parachuting anti-communist expatriate volunteers into Albania, China and other countries to foment unrest via fabricated resistance groups. Sichel had collected intelligence which showed that such operations had no chance of success. The volunteers, he objected, 'were potentially being sent to their deaths. I made a huge fuss.' Also he felt that such operations were against America's true long-term interests. He resigned from the CIA in 1959. As head of his family wine concern Sichel streamlined the business, merging with Schieffelin & Co, an alcohol and pharmaceutical company that could handle importing and distribution, allowing him to concentrate on promoting the company's brands. He would eventually sell the American company in 1995. In 1971 he used his contacts in Bordeaux, to put together a group of investors to buy Château Fourcas Hosten, an underperforming Bordeaux producer in Listrac and after a difficult few years, revived its fortunes, selling the company in 2006. Sichel was the author or editor of several books on wine and in 2016 published a memoir The Secrets of My Life: Vintner, Prisoner, Soldier, Spy. A first marriage, to Cuy Höttler, was dissolved and in 1961 he married Stella Spanoudaki. She and a daughter predeceased him. He is survived by two other daughters. Peter Sichel, born September 12 1922, died February 24 2025 Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. 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New York Times
04-03-2025
- New York Times
Peter Sichel, Wine Merchant With a Cloak-and-Dagger Past, Dies at 102
Refugee, prisoner, wine merchant, spy: Peter Sichel was many things in his long, colorful life, but he was probably most often identified as the man who made Blue Nun one of the most popular wines in the world in the 1970s and '80s. At its peak, in 1985, 30 million bottles of this slightly sweet German white wine — its label featuring smiling nuns holding baskets of grapes in a vineyard — were sold. By the time Mr. Sichel (pronounced sea-SHELL) took charge of his family's wine business in 1960, he had lived a long, clandestine life. For 17 years, first in the Office of Strategic Services during World War II, and then in the Central Intelligence Agency — from its formation in 1947 until he resigned in 1959 — he played a crucial role in gathering intelligence for the United States. He died on Feb. 24 at his home in Manhattan, his daughter Bettina Sichel said. He was 102. As a 19-year-old German émigré to the United States who volunteered for the U.S. Army the day after Pearl Harbor, Mr. Sichel was recruited to join the O.S.S. as part of an effort to build an American intelligence-gathering force where none existed. He served in Algiers in 1942 and '43, and then as head of the O.S.S. unit attached to Gen. George S. Patton's Seventh Army as it drove from Southern France toward Alsace in late 1944. Among his jobs were interrogating German prisoners of war and recruiting volunteers to infiltrate the German lines and report back to him. One of Mr. Sichel's O.S.S. colleagues, George L. Howe, wrote a novel about one such case, made into the highly regarded 1951 film 'Decision Before Dawn,' directed by Anatole Litvak, with a screenplay by another of Mr. Sichel's colleagues, Peter Viertel. After Germany surrendered, Mr. Sichel became the O.S.S. station chief in postwar Berlin. He was 23 and known as 'the wunderkind.' As the O.S.S. evolved into the C.I.A., and the Allies' wartime united front deteriorated into the international standoff that became the Cold War, he oversaw espionage operations. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. Already a subscriber? Log in. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
