At the wine festival in Mandel, the village was decked out with the municipal flag, giving rise to the question of what the coat of arms meant. The arms, approved by the now defunct "Regierungsbezirk" administration in 1959, is derived from the village's former court seal. This court seal in turn had its roots in the arms once borne by the former court lords of Mandel, the Lords of Koppenstein. "Koppe" is apparently a word that means "raven", which led the Koppensteins to adopt the raven as their heraldic device. In their arms, the raven charge stood on two mountaintops, but in Mandel's former court seal, these were changed to two almonds, almost certainly to serve as a canting charge, for "Mandel" also happens to be the German word for “almond”. Since the Koppensteins had sprung from an illegitimate connection with the Counts of Sponheim, they also bore the Sponheims’ blue and gold “chequy” pattern in their arms. The Koppensteins’ arms are also part of those borne by the "Verbandsgemeinde" of Rüdesheim. This stems from the old "Mairie" (“Mayoralty”) of Mandel, a body that existed under Revolutionary and Napoleonic French rule, later the "Bürgermeisterei" (also “Mayoralty”) of Mandel under Prussian rule, which, as a union of Mandel and Hüffelsheim formed the basis of what later became the "Verbandsgemeinde".