Hocks and Moselles

Constable's Wine Library. Edited by André Simon. 1935 First Edition. In 8vo. Pp. [1] f.e., x, 165, [1] folded map, [1] r.e. London. Constable and Company Ltd. Binding in dark red cloth with dust jacket, with a woodcut-style illustration of bottles and glasses in a vivid yellow and white. Minor defects at the jacket back fold and front flap's bottom corner. In excellent condition, complete with the dust jacket. Hocks and Moselles is part of Constable's Wine Library, edited by André L. Simon, a key figure in 20th-century British wine writing. The series (covering Madeira, Sherry, Champagne, Claret, Burgundy, Port, Wine in the Kitchen, and Hocks and Moselles) was written by specialists "in language the layman can perfectly understand," (quoting the Morning Post), aiming to create both an authoritative reference and a form of consumer education for a more discerning British public. This first edition captures a revealing moment in British wine culture between commerce, travel, and connoisseurship. By 1935, as Rudd notes, "Hock" had broadened beyond its geographic origin to include wines from the Rhine, Nahe, and Palatinate - or even, more loosely, any German white wine in the long brown bottle. In practice, British consumers relied on bottle shape as a visual code: brown for Rhine, green for Moselle. Rudd writes within this culture of simplification while seeking to refine it. Unlike contemporary German perspectives framing the Mosel as Heimat, he presents the Rhine and Moselle as landscapes of pleasure, tourist and spa regions an English traveler might visit and return from with improved taste. The tone is one of appreciation rather than ownership, making the book a telling document of interwar British sensibility, where travel, wine knowledge, and polite consumption converge. This copy, with its bright mid-1930s retained dust jacket, preserves that original commercial immediacy unusually well. The book opens with a regional framing of the Rhine and Moselle as a landscape of scenic beauty, tourism, Roman ruins, spa culture, and wine. Its twelve chapters move systematically from general orientation to specific wine regions. Chapter I presents the Rhine and Moselle as an exceptional wine and travel region. Chapter II, "What's In A Name", explains German wine nomenclature for a British reader, including vineyard names, cask numbers, subdivisions, Auslese classifications, and the meanings of terms such as Eigensgewachs, Spatlese, Trockenbeeren Auslese, and Kabinett Wein; it also explains examples of bottle identification and origin, including Hochheim, Moselle bottling conventions, and traceable label forms such as "Brauneberger Juffer, Growth Schmidt, Fuder Nr. 4, 1931". Chapters III-XI proceed geographically from Coblenz through the Rheingau, Nahe Valley, Rheinhessen, the Palatinate, the Moselle Valley, Upper Moselle and Saar, and Middle and Lower Moselle. Throughout, the text uses personal travel and tasting experience as part of its exposition, including references to Bad Kreuznach, the 1921 Berncastler Doctor, cycling in the Palatinate, Amsterdam, the Nahe, and the Saar vineyards. Chapter XII, devoted to vintages, surveys important years from 1857 to 1933, with repeated emphasis on 1921 as a benchmark vintage, alongside years including 1868, 1886, 1893, 1895, 1904, 1911, 1915, 1920, and 1933. At the back is a folding map, a clean black-and-white cartographic rendering of the wine districts of the Rhine and Moselle, conceived as a practical navigational tool. The German wine maze turned into English leisure: labels and bottle shapes decoded, vintages ranked, even tourist tips - with 1930s clarity and a dust jacket that still sells the dream.…