Henkell, Otto Heinrich Adolf

Sparkling wine producer, managing director, co-owner of Sektkellerei Henkell & Co.

born: 20.05.1869 in Mainz

died: 16.07.1929 in Schwarzach near Salzburg (Austria)

Henkell, grandson of Adam Henkell, the founder of the Henkell & Co. sparkling wine company, attended the humanistic Grand Ducal Grammar School in Mainz until 1885. He then attended the commercial college in Antwerp until 1887 and completed apprenticeships in England and the United States. He worked for two years in the London sales agency and spent nine months at the Henkell branch in New York. After his return in May 1891, his father Rudolph Henkell granted him power of attorney and appointed him a partner in February of the following year.

During his stay in America, Henkell had already become familiar with the market advantages of branded goods, especially those of the champagne brands that were already well established in the USA at the time. The combination of branded goods and advertising was to become Henkell's recipe for success: in 1893, he set the course for the introduction of a branded sparkling wine in Mainz. The "Cuvée" was composed from 1892 wines, 20,000 bottles were filled and "Henkell Sect Trocken" was registered as the brand name. In 1894, Henkell launched the first advertising campaign for the new sparkling wine brand, which would eventually experience unprecedented growth as "Henkell Trocken": by 1905, four million bottles had already been bottled. Full-page artistic advertisements in weekly magazines and "current information" in major daily newspapers promoted the new brand. Henkell emphasized the modernity of his young sparkling wine brand by linking it to the technical achievements of the time - automobiles, aviation, ocean-going vessels - and even actively supporting aircraft construction. Henkell was the first to produce sparkling wine on a large scale and took it to the top of the German sparkling wine industry (1910).

In 1907-09, Henkell had a prestigious winery built in "Biebrich-Wiesbaden" by Stuttgart architect Paul Bonatz. The new palatial domicile was not only intended to stand comparison with the Wiesbaden Kurhaus, but also with the chateaus of the champagne competition in France. Henkell, who had already moved his residence to Wiesbaden in 1906/7, also had a base wine and cuvée cellar built in Reims in 1912/13, which was expropriated after the end of the First World War. The architect of this winery was also Bonatz.

Henkell saw himself as a representative of the "development generation" who knew how to take advantage of the economic boom of the imperial era. From 1900, he was the main decision-maker in the winery. He managed the company in a patriarchal manner, both during the lifetime of his father, who died in 1912, and since his brother Karl Henkell became a partner in 1911. He led the company through all crises, such as the First World War and the currency reform.

Henkell and his wife Katharina, known as Käthe, also acted as patrons of the arts, initially due to the various building and advertising commissions. Their friendships with Paul Bonatz and Olaf Gulbransson, the Städel director Georg Swarzenski and later also with the circle around Hanna Bekker vom Rath bear witness to this.