Wilhelm Herold (entrepreneur)

Wilhelm Herold (born June 1, 1874 in Heilbronn ; † May 23, 1945 there ) was a German entrepreneur . He was a master cooper , pulled quality wines and gave new impetus to viticulture in Württemberg .

Life

Wilhelm Herold was the fourth child of the trained cooper Jacob Wilhelm Herold and his wife Marie Luise, b. Mössinger. Jacob Wilhelm Herold (* 1837; † 1906) had worked in Basel and Lausanne , among other places , and finally turned to brewing . In 1864 he set up a brewery at Heilbronner Keltergasse 3. In the family home, Keltergasse 9 (now: Allerheiligenstrasse 28), he ran a bar. In 1869 he built his first beer cellar on the state road to Flein , which is now called Charlottenstraße . In 1886 a beer and ice cellar was added there. Jacob Wilhelm Herold retired in the mid-1890s. His son Friedrich took over the brewery in Keltergasse for a short time, but in 1904 he emigrated to Bolivia . From 1909 Emil Herold, the youngest son, also lived in South America. The Cervecería Herold , which the two had launched, existed until 1956 .

The son Wilhelm Herold, on the other hand, became a cooper, like his father and his grandfather Friedrich Herold, who came from Adelsheim , and stayed in Heilbronn. In 1901 he became a master. In the same year, on August 15th, he married Marie Föll, who also came from a cooper family. Two years after the wedding, Wilhelm Herold was able to take over his father-in-law's cooper workshop at Rappengasse (now: Hasengasse) 6 in Heilbronn. This workshop was located in an outbuilding in a courtyard behind the house, where there was also space for a wine press, a distillery and a stable for two horses. From 1914 the wine was pressed hydraulically in the press. There were also two deep, vaulted wine cellars, which Wilhelm Herold junior had connected with a third in 1908.

He specialized in Weinküferei, although the chapter on Holzküferei in the Catechism of the enology of Richard Meissner was written in part from him. He made his own and other wines; Among other things, he also marketed the wines from the locations on Heilbronner Nord - and on Stiftsberg, which belonged to his in-laws, under the name of W. Föll's Erben . From 1920 his wine shop was listed in the commercial register.

At the beginning of September 1924 the 31st German Viticulture Congress took place in Heilbronn. Herold was on both the main committee and the wine exhibition and tasting committee. Of the 118 samples of Württemberg wines that were presented for tasting, 14 came from Wilhelm Herold or from Föll's heirs. Herold wines were also represented at the German Agricultural Exhibition in 1926 in Breslau and at the Reichsnährstand exhibition in 1936 in Frankfurt am Main ; Herolds grape wines received a second prize here.

At the Württemberg grape, fruit and autumn flower show in Heilbronn in 1927, he and two colleagues headed the “Wine Propaganda” department.

In 1929 the German Agricultural Society wrote a competition for "permanent wines that have to make long overseas trips". Herold, who had dealt intensively with the question of the shelf life of wines, received several prizes and recognition for his products. One of the prerequisites for shipping wines overseas was that they were bottled, which a few years before this point in time was absolutely not customary in Württemberg. Herold broke new ground here, which already impressed the young Theodor Heuss and led him to later highlight Herold's role model for viticulture in Württemberg.

From around 1920 Wilhelm Herold was chairman of the United Cooper Masters in Heilbronn and the surrounding area; Years before that, he had become a committee member of the regional association of south-west German self-employed cooperators, and in this function he had also organized the 25th Association Day in Heilbronn in 1929. At the end of 1933 or beginning of 1934, however, he had to resign as head of the guild, which was apparently not only related to the " Gleichschaltung " that was carried out at that time. According to the guild, his membership in a Masonic lodge was criticized, which, however, cannot be proven.

Herold's parents-in-law had a house built on Siebennussbaumstrasse in 1904 based on a design by the architectural office Maute und Moosbrugger , which initially had house number 19, which was later changed to number 51. After Wilhelm Föll died in 1923, the Herold couple moved into this house. The shop and cooperage remained in Rappengasse 6. Behind the house in Siebennussbaumstrasse was a stone table that had originally been in Rappengasse and where Mark Twain was said to have sat and drank wine during his visit to Heilbronn in 1878.

The cooperage in the old town was destroyed and possibly looted during the air raids on Heilbronn . Wilhelm Herold died shortly after the end of the war in his house on Siebennussbaumstrasse. The house survived the war and was only demolished in the 1970s. Traces of Herold's work in Heilbronn, who campaigned for the establishment of the viticulture museum at Karlstraße 44 in the 1920s, are an old silver cup for the young master's drink and the table of the Heilbronn cooperage masters, whom Herold saved from the Second World War .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Illustration of the cover sheet of the catechism 'der Kellerwirtschaft
2. ↑ Dorothea Braun-Ribbat and Annette Geisler, a master of his subject. Wilhelm Herold (1874–1945) , in: Christhard Schrenk (ed.), Heilbronner Köpfe VII. Pictures of life from four centuries (= Small series of publications from the Heilbronn Archives 61), Heilbronn City Archives 2014, ISBN 978-3-940646-16- 3 , pp. 159-170