The wine world has lost two outstanding and quite different characters.
This week, we have sadly learned of the passing of former Bordeaux négociant, Bill Blatch and former German brand-builder, spy and Bordeaux château-owner Peter Max Sichel.
I knew and learned from both men and will miss them.
Peter M.F. Sichel
Peter Max Sichel – almost always referred to in this way to avoid confusion with his cousin Peter Allen Sichel of Châteaux Palmer and d’Angludet - was born in Mainz in 1922 to an old family of Jewish wine merchants. After suffering “every child’s disease except whooping cough” by the age of seven, as Nazism took hold, he was sent to boarding school in England 1935 by his parents who fled Germany for Bordeaux where his father took over the management of the family business.
A past as a spy
After the German occupation of France, in 1941, the Sichel family escaped to the US via Spain and Portugal. Two years later, aged 21, Peter, who had volunteered to join the US army, found himself on a secret mission to Tangiers for the OSS, the organisation that would become the CIA.
This first experience as a spy led to 16 years of clandestine activity including spells as station chief in Berlin and Hong Kong. The US espionage community of the time seemed to spend more time drinking than almost anything else and, when he resigned in 1959, Sichel was, as Jancis Robinson noted wrily in a profile “probably the only person who left the CIA in fear of becoming an alcoholic – and then went into the wine business.”
Another reason for leaving was, he wrote in his autobiography, the realisation that “the then-prevailing US government policy” did not “coincide” with his ideas of what was necessary for the US to prevail in the Cold War.” What he was really referring to, as is made clear in a forthcoming TV programme about him called The Last Spy, was his dislike of some of the CIA’s covert operations.
The US wine business at the end of the 1950s was also a murky place, where bribes and pay-offs were routine – a situation that continued until the mid-1980s when, as Sichel noted, “all major companies paid heavy fines, in the millions. To safeguard their licenses and keep out of jail.” All the “dirty” part of the business happened at the level of the sales staff, however, way beneath Sichel’s level, which was focused on building brands. These included some failures, such as My Cousin’s Claret which came with a message from the other Peter Sichel; a moderate success called Wan Fu - “To eat Chinese without Wan Fu is to eat but with one chopstick” – and an off-dry German wine that went by the name of Blue Nun. With the help of radio and TV advertising, this cleverly-blended product - Müller-Thurgau, Silvaner and Gewürztraminer had more appeal than Riesling – became a best-seller in the US and then globally. Along with Mateus Rosé, it was one of the world's first high-volume, global, wine brand.
From Blue Nun to Listrac
In 1971, with a group of other investors, Sichel bought Château Fourcas-Hosten in Listrac, down the road from his cousin’s estate in Margaux. A decade or so later, he had to find more money to take it over and invest in improving its quality. But, as he told me at the time, finally selling it in 2006 was probably the happiest moment of the relationship.
Sichel lived in New York where, throughout his time in the wine trade and in retirement, he remained an extraordinarily wise voice, with a clear view that nothing good or bad lasts forever, and a readiness to be unsurprised. I recall talking to him a few days after 9/11. “I told my daughter. ‘Welcome to the real world’”
Bill Blatch
Twenty-six years after Peter Max Sichel’s birth, a child christened William John Beachcroft Blatch but forever known as Bill, was born in Britain. In 1974, after working as a buyer for Grants of St James’s, at the age of 26, he moved to Bordeaux to become export director of a negociant called Delor & Compagnie. After spells with two more merchants, Dourthe and Dulong, with Ulla Delpech, in 1981 he launched his own négociant business, Vintex.
Bordeaux en primeur
I first met Bill, who died while on holiday in Tahiti, in the 1980s when, as editor of a young UK wine magazine I began to attend the annual en primeur ‘circus’. I quickly tired of the media-focused heavy chateau lunches and dinners that punctuated long days of tastings and, quite frankly, the bullshit surrounding an event at which samples of the same wine varied depending where you encountered them and estate-owners who span stories that had often had a loose relationship to the truth.
Bill suggested that I give up the press junket and turn up, instead, on the weekend before the en primeur week, to sample a huge range of wines in his offices, along with buyers from across the world and, on occasion, an American critic called Parker, for whose palate – if not always his recommendations – he had the highest respect. The following morning, it was time to join those same buyers on the first of a set of gruelling tasting days. We assembled at 07.15, as I recall, armed with a bit of bread and ham and a hastily gulped coffee, before driving at scary speeds up the Médoc or across to St Emilion.
Every day was like a top-level Bordeaux immersion course. Crucially, Bill was able to deconstruct the components of a young tannic Bordeaux in ways I certainly could not when I began. He taught me, for instance, to understand the role of the press wine that often had not yet been added to the samples that were being shown to press and buyers in April. I learned to neither over- nor under-estimate the impact of particular kinds of oak. And, perhaps most helpfully of all, Bill helped me to gauge the quality of his favourite Bordeaux, the Sauternes and Barsacs, that I found hard to judge in their youth.
Helpful affair
Bill always had clear memories – and copious notes – not only of previous vintages but also often of the way the wines had tasted a few weeks earlier and the background to their production. One chateau’s effort had improved because its owner’s wife had embarked on an affair with a very good consultant. Another was suffering because money that should have been invested in quality improvement was being spent on gambling.
As we raced from one estate to the next, while recounting often unrepeatable stories about some of the Bordelais, and accounts of his own fishing expeditions, Bill would get calls revealing that Chateau A or B had come out at X euros more or less than the previous year, and he’d share some extremely frank views on the logic and legitimacy behind those prices.
While he knew all the great and good of the region – and was photographed alongside them in his tuxedo, Bill was also on first name terms with countless technical directors and maitres de chais who gave him the background information that later became invaluable when he took over the writing of an annual vintage report from Peter Allen Sichel. It was one of these cellar masters, Raoul Blondin of Mouton Rothschild, who encouraged Bill to start his own business.
Peter Max Sichel’s autobiography, The Secrets of My Life, is subtitled ‘Vintner, Prisoner, Soldier, Spy’. Coincidentally Jane Anson’s says in her obituary of Bill Blatch that he “remained, to many, the ultimate ‘secret agent’ of Bordeaux”.
These two men exemplified so many aspects of the wine industry, and an understanding and appreciation of quality and commerciality, and a readiness to look beyond the obvious and superficial.
