Wine habit
The surprisingly rich story of Blue Nun from 1920s Germany to Rod Stewart and Alan Partridge.
When the writers of 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 than Blue Nun. Later Alan replays the incident in his dreams where he is dancing in a leather posing pouch for Hayers who is laughing hysterically and screaming ‘Blue Nun!’ while holding a bottle.
Blue Nun, a sweet German wine that was selling three million cases a year in the early ‘80s, had by the late ‘90s when this episode first aired become a two word joke. I remember from my student days that one could just say the words ‘blue’ and ‘nun’ and watch the hilarity ensue. But Blue Nun shouldn’t be just a joke. Not only does this much-maligned wine have a rich history, but whisper it, it’s actually not so bad, and it’s still going strong. Last year it celebrated its 100th anniversary.
The first Blue Nun was a 1921 Liebfraumilch, then a respected white wine from the Rhine in Germany. It was shipped to London by the Sichels of Mainz with a brown label featuring a picture of nuns wearing blue habits. Peter Sichel in his rollocking memoir The Secrets of my Life recounts how Blue Nun took off: ‘Customers placed new orders, specifically requesting the Blue Nun label.’ The Sichels were a German Jewish family. When the Nazis came to power Peter fled to Bordeaux where the family had interests. He later went to America where he worked for the CIA.
At a time when most wine was sold either in restaurants or by the case rather than off the shelf, the idea of having a striking label and brand name was a new concept. In 1930, the Sichels decided to put the words ‘Blue Nun’ on the label for the first time, and began exporting outside the two biggest markets, Britain and America. Surprisingly, Sichel recounts how the brand continued to be sold to the Allied powers even during the Second World War.
The Blue Nun name was applied to a range of products. But in 1961, the firm ‘eliminated the Blue Nun label on all wine except Liebfraumilch and a sparkling wine’, Sichel writes. It was a blend of riesling, muller-thurgau, silvaner and a little gewurztraminer with about 2.5% residual sugar, which works out at 18g per litre. So pretty sweet rather than just off-dry.
There was an emerging market in Britain and America, ‘people who took up wine-drinking for the first time, and wanted an inexpensive sweet wine that was low in alcohol,’ according to Andrew Barr in his book Wine Snobbery. The firm undertook research into how wine was drunk, how sweet it should be and sold it with the line: ‘the wine that goes with every dish’. Jancis Robinson describes the marketing strategy: ‘substantial investment in advertising which preyed on the fears of what was then an unsophisticated wine drinking public’. The key was consistency ‘never mind the year on the bottle or its origin’, as Sichel put it. The nuns, however, did evolve from aloof and unsmiling in the early ‘60s, to come-hither smiles in the ‘70s. Saucy!
Blue Nun was the first, but its success inspired others including Black Tower which was released by another German wine company Kendemans in 1967. Marketing guru David Gluckman, the man behind products such as Bailey’s Irish Cream and author of That Sh*t Will Never Sell, explained the appeal: ‘They came in bottles that were easy to recognise on the shelf. They were widely distributed. And perhaps most importantly, they tasted good.’ Blue Nun sold on a traditional German image but it was a high tech wine for the time. Former Black Tower wine maker, Nayan Gowda explained how similar wines were made possible by sterile filtering which stopped the sugar fermenting in the bottle.
It’s hard to imagine now, but Blue Nun was aspirational in the ‘60s and ‘70s. There’s a great image of Rod Stewart in his ‘70s pomp waving a bottle of Blue Nun at a distinctly nonplussed David Bowie. But this all changed in the 1980s. Customers on both sides of the Atlantic were moving on to the dry, full-bodied wines coming out of California, Australia and Chile. Mocking Blue Nun was a way for novice wine drinkers to parade their sophistication. Just as with his taste in music like ELO, Wings and Abba, Alan Partridge is out of time, what would have been acceptable in the ‘70s, was irretrievably naff 20 years later.
Yet people who genuinely know about wine, tend not to be so dismissive. Jancis Robinson admitted that quality was high while Peter Sichel notes that Robert Parker was a fan. Gowda said: ‘I think Black Tower and Blue Nun are very good products. I’m not embarrassed about making it.’ Meanwhile British wine buyer Steve Daniel who at Oddbins pioneered Australian and Chilean wine in the ‘80s and ‘90s is happy to admit he ‘started by drinking Liebfraumilch’.
In 1996, the Sichel family sold Blue Nun to Langguth, a German wine company which tried to reinvigorate the brand by making it less sweet, launching a higher quality varietal riesling and somewhat inevitably, repackaging the wine in blue bottles. But at some point the saucy nuns disappeared.
Patrick Langguth said: ‘our own people lost their connection with the nun and tried to get rid of her.’ For the 100th anniversary last year the brand collaborated with (apparently) legendary New York designer Paula Scher to reinvent the nun for the 21st century with an art deco look. Very striking but sadly it didn’t turn around the fortunes of the brand. Perhaps they should have wheeled out Rod Stewart or Steve Coogan in a leather posing pouch.