Mozley’s interest in wine, its ambience, vineyards, and dining had begun early in his career, and interestingly enough through illustration and his friendships. In 1947, he illustrated an article in the ‘Leader’ Magazine by, an as yet little known Laurie Lee, entitled ‘Chianti in the Sun’. The magazine introduced him as ‘Charles Mozley illustrator of Chianti has a long and miserable “broody period” before he can settle down to drawing, which is otherwise “very pleasant work.” He never makes pencil sketches first, goes straight ahead with pen. Finds that as an artist never has any leisure: “subconsciously you are storing images all the time.” Has done many film posters including those for Ideal Husband and Queen of Spades. Favourite subjects for drawing: women.’

His friendships with Tommy Marks, Marketing Director of Guinness and then Chairman of Harp Lager, and George Rainbird, publisher and writer both on wine and sherries only intensified his interest. In 1964, Mozley illustrated a short story by Evelyn Waugh “Fizz, Bubbly and Pop”, and in 1966 commenced an association with Bass Charrington Vintners and its various subsidiaries which would last fifteen years. This had come about through his friend David Russell, an ex-actor, whom Mozley had met at one of the lavish parties organised by Sir Alexander Korda, who now covered the Group’s PR requirements at Galatzine, Chant & Russell.

Mozley was a lover of fine wines, but showed his Yorkshire upbringing in being a very moderate drinker. He enjoyed the conviviality of these new relationships and thrived on the commissions to paint in France, Italy and Germany that they generated. Jancis Robinson noted in her book Tasting Pleasure: Confessions of a Wine Lover:

“This time I stayed at the Gritti Palace, dining on a terrace which seems almost to be floating on the Grand Canal. Also in the party was Charles Mozley, the leonine artist and illustrator whom David Russell had persuaded to do some work for Bass Charrington’s wine company Hedges & Butler in exchange, I suspect, for vast amounts of wine. His impressionistic pastels of the Bordeaux chateaux are now collector’s items and join all sorts of bargain bottles as purchases I wish I had made. Charles was mercurial, however, and although the trip was virtually fault- free, he needed cosseting and humouring. Indeed, David Russell made a speciality of humouring difficult characters such as Mozley, the Rothschilds of Mouton and Cyril Ray, an elegant and urbane writer whom he also cajoled into ornamenting Hedges & Butler’s public face.”

Mozley was to illustrate a monograph on the family and winery Ruffino by Ray and, in 1979, combined with him to produce an amusing little book for Dent entitled Liquorish Limericks and Filthy Pictures.

Contemporaneously with his landscape and portrait painting, lithographic and illustrative work, Mozley was encouraged by the Mayfair Gallery owner Peter Matthews (son-in-law of the well-established art dealer Dudley Tooth) to concentrate on his portrayals of life in both the rarefied and the less salubrious atmosphere of Parisian life. The series of six exhibitions that were held at Matthews’s Gallery in Mayfair and Burke’s Club in Berkeley Square from 1968 to 1975 were perhaps the most successful of his exhibitions. The most acclaimed were the exhibitions of his lithographic work in the 1940s and the most prestigious and substantial the exhibition at Somerset House and Palazzo Prigione in 1979 and at Hamiltons in 1983. Charles Mozley had always had a somewhat contentious relationship with dealers and art critics. He had always balked at the idea of using an agent to promote his work and was profoundly at odds with much in the art world and its self-promoting array of ‘experts’. And yet, he was good friends of both Matthews and previously Robert Savage who had exhibited his work at his gallery in South Kensington. The art world was obviously very different in its structure than it has become since the 1980s. Government funding, both local and national, played virtually no part. Corporate sponsorship was only beginning its incursion into re-entering the art world and the art establishment was still steeped in its academic roots, while the teaching of art had lost any requirements of necessitating the teaching of technical skills.

Mozley had a very active social life. He was a member, at various times of such diverse clubs as the Garrick and the Chelsea Arts Club, and dining clubs: The Double Crown, the Wynken de Worde and the Omar Khayyam. Very different ambiences, but it was that variety of social groupings that he enjoyed and stimulated his visual imagery and fantasy. He was a gregarious, spontaneous and opinionated individual with a wide circle of friends that never ceased to encourage him into new ventures.