Professor Rod Phillips gave an invited paper at the Eighth Transnational Rhine Conference, held from 19 to 21 May in Oestrich-Winkel and Eltville, Germany. These towns are on the River Rhine, whose political, economic, and cultural significance in history is the focus of the conferences. Wine and tourism were among the themes of the eighth meeting.
The Rhine has long been an important wine region, and Rod spoke about the reception of Rhine wines on international markets in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Drawing on English wine books and store catalogs from the 1800s, he pointed to the high estimation (and price) of these wines, which were valued not only for their quality but for their supposed medicinal properties. He also drew on the menus and wine lists digitized by the New York Public Library to show that in the expensive restaurants of nineteenth-century New York, the most prestigious white wines from the Rhine were priced higher than the ‘best’ red wines from Bordeaux – even though the latter were generally the most prestigious in the world.
On international markets from the 1700s until the mid-1900s, Rhine wine was generally known as ‘Hock’ (from the town of Hochheim). An indicator of the estimation of wine from the region was the use of ‘Hock’ to brand white wine that was made in places as diverse as California and Australia – just as producers in these regions appropriated prestigious French names such as Burgundy and Champagne.