From a wine export house to one of Germany’s first Sekt makers.

Henkell began in Mainz in 1832, when Adam Henkell founded the wine business Henkell & Cie. The Wiesbaden city encyclopedia, the Stadtlexikon, describes it as a wine export company set up with a partner, and dates the start of sparkling-wine production in Mainz to 1856. German Wikipedia says Henkell had a “champagne factory” built on Walpodenstraße in Mainz about twenty-five years after the founding, making him one of the first in Germany to master the technique of turning still wine into Sekt.

The brand that carries the name today came later. The Stadtlexikon says Henkell Trocken was created in 1894 and protected as a trademark in 1898; German Wikipedia, citing the trade magazine Lebensmittel Praxis, calls it one of the first brands in Germany to be officially protected. Demand grew quickly: by 1906, the Stadtlexikon says, three million bottles had been produced and the Mainz premises had become too small.

The answer was a new cellar across the Rhine in Biebrich, then still an independent town and now part of Wiesbaden. Otto Henkell, the founder’s grandson, commissioned the Stuttgart architect Paul Bonatz, and the building on Biebricher Allee was built between 1907 and 1909 and inaugurated on 27 November 1909, the Stadtlexikon says, calling it one of the most modern Sekt cellars in Europe. Its three wings borrow from Baroque palace architecture while housing industrial production, and its marble hall, the Marmorsaal, was painted in a Rococo style at the end of the 1920s. German Wikipedia describes it as the company’s head office today.

Simplicissimus, Jugend and the Pikkolo.

Henkell Trocken was heavily advertised. Between 1900 and 1920, both English and German Wikipedia say, large-format advertisements appeared regularly in the illustrated magazines Jugend and Simplicissimus, drawn by artists including Thomas Theodor Heine, Ernst Oppler, Lucian Bernhard, Gino von Finetti and Adolf Münzer; the Stadtlexikon adds the caricaturist Olaf Gulbransson. The Biebrich building itself appeared in several full-page advertisements drawn in Bernhard’s poster style. German Wikipedia says Otto Henkell and the chocolate maker Ludwig Stollwerck are regarded as the inventors of joint advertising, in which companies in one industry developed and paid for marketing together, from about 1900.

In 1935 Henkell began selling small bottles under the name Pikkolo, which, the Stadtlexikon says, became a byword in Germany for the quarter-bottle of Sekt; German Wikipedia says the company registered the name under its senior partner Karl Henkell. From 1936, German Wikipedia says, a black cut-paper silhouette of a gentleman, the “Schwarzer Herr,” served for many years as the emblem of Henkell Trocken.

The company’s history in this period is also documented. On 5 July 1920 Joachim von Ribbentrop married Otto Henkell’s daughter Annelies and was put in charge of the firm’s Berlin branch, according to the Deutsche Biographie; he became Hitler’s foreign minister in 1938.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all German, Indian and Chinese wine and Sekt producers: Dr. Loosen, Schloss Johannisberg, Henkell, Rotkäppchen, Sula Vineyards, Grover Zampa and Changyu. Wine and Sekt producers in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family estates that still carry a founder’s name to labels that now belong to much larger drinks groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a corner shop to a restaurant list.

A wine or Sekt brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single bottle than by a label, a name and the place it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its production or grown far beyond the place where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its wine or Sekt is actually made and bottled.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its wine or Sekt is made and how its labels have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

From family firm to Henkell Freixenet.

The Henkell family ran the business into the postwar decades; the Stadtlexikon says Karl Henkell joined his brother Otto as a partner in 1911 and that Otto Hubertus Henkell took over the management in 1948. The company bought the vodka brand Gorbatschow in 1960 and the Sektkellerei Carstens in Neustadt an der Weinstraße in 1975. In 1986, German Wikipedia says, Otto Henkell junior sold the business to Rudolf-August Oetker, whose group already owned the rival Söhnlein Rheingold cellar in nearby Schierstein; in 1987 the two merged as Henkell & Söhnlein, based in Biebrich. The name changed to Henkell & Co. Sektkellerei KG in 2009. The group belongs to the Oetker family: German Wikipedia says it was part of the Dr. August Oetker KG until October 2021 and has since belonged to the branch of the family organised as Geschwister Oetker, which English Wikipedia names as its parent. Compare Dr. Oetker, the Bielefeld food brand from which the group grew.

Expansion followed across Europe: Hungary’s Törley in 1992, Deinhard of Koblenz in 1997, Bohemia Sekt in 1999, the Champagne house Alfred Gratien in 2000 and the Prosecco maker Mionetto of Valdobbiadene in 2008, German Wikipedia says; the group also owns the Rheingau estate Schloss Johannisberg. In March 2018 Henkell bought a majority of the Catalan cava house Freixenet, The Drinks Business reported, and the group now trades as Henkell Freixenet. On 2 March 2026 it took full control, buying the remaining shares from the Ferrer family and José Luis Bonet, Shanken News Daily reported; Andreas Brokemper remained chief executive. Henkell Trocken itself is exported to more than seventy countries, the Stadtlexikon says.

The name is easy to confuse with Henkel, with one “l,” the Düsseldorf maker of adhesives and detergents; the two companies are unrelated.

For a design guide, Henkell shows how a Sekt brand grew on illustrated magazine advertising, artist-drawn posters and a palace-like cellar. Compare Freixenet, the cava house it now owns, and Rotkäppchen, its eastern German rival. For this guide we use bottle green, foil gold and marble cream with a high-contrast serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Henkell’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.