Sierra Madre

From the Hagen market hall to a German premium spirits importer

The history of Sierra Madre GmbH begins in the mid-1990s in a Hagen pub: founder Guido Klaumann meets Jürgen Stroschein there, the operator of a Mexican snack stand in the Hagen market hall. From this chance encounter, a company is born in 1995 that initially imports Mexican food and specialties to Germany. The name Sierra Madre — Spanish for "mother mountain" — carries Latin American DNA at its core from the very beginning. About two decades after its founding, around 2013 and 2014, the company reaches an important turning point: Stroschein retires, Timo Fischer and Marcus da Costa join the company management, and Sierra Madre consistently shifts its focus to the distribution of high-quality spirits.

Today, after three decades on the market, the owner-managed company based in Hagen (North Rhine-Westphalia) is one of the leading German importers of premium spirits — a development that surely no one expected when it was founded as a small food retailer.

Curated portfolio instead of an off-the-shelf catalog

What drives Sierra Madre can be described in a sentence from the company itself: only when the end customer is convinced of a product does real demand arise in the trade. In accordance with this principle, Sierra Madre relies on direct market proximity — up to 120 trade fairs and 250 tastings per year, where the team personally stands behind the bottles. The development of the portfolio does not follow the logic of volume trading, but the principle of targeted brand development: Sierra Madre acts as an exclusive importer for selected producers and actively supports their brands in the German and European market. This requires background knowledge about production, raw materials, and origin — and it is precisely this knowledge that the team passes on to specialist retailers, gastronomy, and end customers.

The change from wholesaler to importer for premium brands was, according to Brand Manager Marius Rupieper, a conscious decision: through the entry into 100 percent agave tequila, they slipped deeper and deeper into the world of spirits — rum, gin, whiskey, brandy, and sherry followed step by step. Each new category was only added to the portfolio when the team itself was convinced of the product.

Rum from the Philippines, gin from London — a global portfolio with a clear signature

The Sierra Madre range today spans a wide arc: from Philippine Don Papa Rum to the multi-award-winning Brockmans Gin from London to aged rarities like El Ron Prohibido with 22 years of barrel aging in the Solera process or the Dos Maderas Rum Añejo 5+3. What connects these bottles is not a geographical commonality, but an editorial one: Sierra Madre selects producers who tell their own story — about their raw materials, their distillation methods, their origin. In the Vinoscout range, you will find a selection of this curated brand world: spirits where the journey from harvest to bottle remains traceable.