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Peter M.F. Sichel’s life was the stuff of cinematic thrillers. As a young German Jew, he escaped the Nazis and emigrated to America, where he signed up with the predecessor to the CIA. After working as a spy during World War II and the Cold War, he returned to his family’s wine business, where he helped build Blue Nun into one of America’s favorite wines.
Sichel passed away Feb. 24. He was 104.
“A favorite phrase of Peter’s I keep thinking of is, ‘Getting old is not for the faint of heart.’ Just one testament to his courage and joie de vivre,” his daughter Bettina Sichel told Wine Spectator. “His death makes me sad for me, but not for him. He led an amazing life and went out on his own terms.”
A Comfortable Childhood Ripped Away
Born Sept. 12, 1922, in Mainz, Germany, Sichel grew up in a prosperous Jewish family that owned the H. Sichel Söhne wine house. Sichel’s great-grandfather had begun buying and selling wine in Germany in the mid-1800s. As Sichel described in his self-published memoir, his childhood was comfortable, in a house that prized education and gastronomy. At age 13 he went to boarding school.
When the Nazi party took control of Germany, his parents left for France, setting up new offices for the family business in London and Bordeaux. Peter was interning at the Bordeaux office in 1940 when the Germans conquered France, and he was imprisoned. He was able to escape, traveling through Spain and then Portugal before reaching the United States.
From Espionage to Wine
When the U.S. entered the war, Sichel immediately enlisted. With his fluency in German, he was assigned to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the government’s fledging espionage agency. Soon he was running spies, recruiting German POWs who were dissatisfied with the Nazi regime. After the war, Sichel continued his spy work for the Central Intelligence Agency, reporting on the Soviet Union’s tightening control of East Germany. He would eventually serve as CIA station chief in Berlin and Hong Kong.
In 1959, Sichel retired from spycraft, displeased with some of the CIA’s methods, and returned to New York City, where his family’s wine company was now based. He met his future wife, Stella, and they married in 1961 and had three daughters. Peter proved as capable a wine executive as a spy, helping build a market for wine in the U.S. as consumers were becoming increasingly curious about table wine.
The Bottle with the Blue Nun
Among the highlights was the worldwide success of Blue Nun, beginning in the 1960s. The brand was a Liebfraumilch, a medium-dry style of white wine designed to be easy drinking. Launched by the Sichel family in 1923, it was dubbed Blue Nun after the image on the label of nuns in a vineyard with a bright blue sky behind them. Peter’s marketing campaign touted it as a wine you could drink “right through the meal” without worrying about what food you were pairing it with. Annual U.S. sales reached a high of 1.25 million cases in 1984.
Sichel purchased a majority stake in Château Fourcas Hosten in Bordeaux during this time. He eventually sold H. Sichel Söhne in 1995 and Fourcas Hosten in 2002.
He spent his later years as an author and wine educator, self-publishing his memoir in 2016. Along the way, Sichel built a strong network of friends and colleagues, and earned an eminent place in the industry. In 1989, Wine Spectator awarded Sichel the Distinguished Service Award.
Sichel is survived by his daughters Bettina and Sylvia and five grandchildren. His wife, Stella, died in 2022 and his daughter Alexandra died in 2014.
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