Hocks and Moselles

Constable's Wine Library. Edited by André Simon. Pp. [1] f.e., x, 165, [1] folded map, [1] r.e. 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. Interwar Britain explains German wine through taste, travel, and bottle shapes. 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. …