Peter Sichel

Who is Peter Sichel?

Peter Max F. Sichel is a German American wine merchant, who created the success of the Blue Nun wine brand, for a while the largest international wine brand in the world.

He was born in Mainz in 1922, where his grandfather's family wine business, H. Sichel Söhne had been established. He was educated in Germany and at [Stowe] in England. The firm had offices in London and Bordeaux, and at the start of World War II while he was apprenticed to the Bordeaux firm, he was interned, as he was Jewish. He escaped to the USA via Spain, where he worked as a US Foreign Service Officer, running agents in Germany, for which he was given the Distinguished Intelligence Medal.

He continued to work for the Central Intelligence Agency in Berlin, Washington and Hong Kong until 1960, when he left, saying "I left because the CIA did things I didn’t like, such as send people into the Ukraine to work in fabricated resistance groups. They were potentially being sent to their deaths. I made a huge fuss." He took over the family wine import business in New York, which he dissolved, instead dealing with Schieffelin, then a large drinks company. At this time wine was taking off as a drink in America, overtaking fortified wine, and he advertised Blue Nun as a wine you can drink "right through the meal", using widespread advertising. At its peak in the 1980s, annual sales in the US reached 1.25 million cases.