06-03-2025
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
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