In the last quarter of the nineteenth century a run of excellent vintages, peace and free trade made German wine one of the most sought-after in Europe and America. Many of the merchants who carried it abroad were Jewish: the sons of Hermann Sichel in Mainz, Leo Levitta of Rüdesheim, Julius Langenbach in Worms, Sigmund Loeb in Trier.
Their strength was trade rather than land: long mercantile experience, family networks across borders and customers among the nobility and the emigrant communities who wanted German wine. The Mainz firm H. Sichel Söhne launched Blue Nun in 1923, a Liebfraumilch that became one of the best-known German wine brands in the world.
Their position was contested long before 1933: historians trace campaigns against Jewish wine merchants in Central Europe back to the decades before the First World War. After 1933 boycotts cut firms off from their customers. One family business in Landau in the Palatinate, Hermann Levy, which traded Liebfraumilch and Riesling wholesale, lost its customers and was sold at a heavy loss after the pogrom of November 1938.
The networks these merchants had built were destroyed with them. For anyone working with German wine today, this is part of the history behind the names on old labels: many of the export routes for Rhine and Mosel wine were opened by these firms.
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