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Peter Sichel From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jump to: navigation, search Peter Max F. Sichel (born September 12, 1922[1]) is a German American wine merchant, who created the success of the Blue Nun wine brand, for a while one of the largest international wine brands in the world.

He was born in Mainz in 1922, where his grandfather's family wine business, H. Sichel Söhne had been established.[2] He was educated in Germany and at Stowe School[3] 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, inspite of being a Jewish refugee, because he still was considered German by the Franch. He escaped to the USA via Spain and joined the OSS shortly after volunteering for the army, following the attack on Pearl Harbor. After serving with OSS in Algiers, he recruited agents in France after August 1944 and ran them into Germany to gather largely tactical information. He continued to work for the Central Intelligence Agency after the war, serving 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.[5] Peter has appeared often on television in Germany as a witness to the immediate post-war years in Berlin[6] [7] when he was head of the CIA in Berlin, and wrote several books on German wine and a guide to wine. He became chairman of the German parent company in 1984. By the 1990s, the Sichel company was sold to another German company, Langguth, He was president of the International Wine and Spirit Competition in 1991. Until 2006 he owned the Bordeaux Château Fourcas-Hosten in Listrac, which he sold to two brothers, co-owners of Hermès.[8]

On the Beastie Boys 1992 album Check Your Head there is a musical interlude called The Blue Nun in which a narrator describes a party held in Peter Sichel's comfortable study in his New York townhouse in which the guests compliment the wine. This includes samples from Peter's audio recording "On Wine: How to Select and Serve". Publications[edit] •	Peter M.F. Sichel and Judy Ley, Which Wine: The Wine Drinker's Buying Guide, 1975, ISBN 0-06-013867-X •	Peter M.F. Sichel, The Wines of Germany: Completely Revised Edition of Frank Schoonmaker's Classic, 1980, ISBN 0-8038-8100-2 •	Peter Sichel, On Wine: How to Select and Serve: Vol 1, audio recording, Columbia Special Products (CSP 151). •	Peter Sichel, The Secrets of My Life: Vintner, Prisoner, Soldier, Spy, Archway Publishing 2016 ISBN 978-14808-2406-5