Quietly determined Martin Mullen had a falling-out of almost biblical proportions with his father, ending up with Martin going his own way and effectively building up his vineyard holdings from scratch. Martin and his wife Susanne started their winery in 1986. It began as a hobby but quickly became full-time.
We had been watching his wines for a while. Shallow as it may sound, we were originally put off by the kitsch bird motif on one of his labels. But then the wines haunted us and we got over the labels and revelled in the beautiful, poised, focused wines of finesse and polish. Notably, theirs is the only winery on the Mosel to exclusively use big old wooden casks (fuders).
Krov may have been built on the bawdy image of the Krover “Nacktarsch” (naked bottom), but Martin almost single-handedly raised the reputation of its finest slopes “Paradies” and “Letterlay” in the late 1990s and early 2000s with his hauntingly fragrant, pure wines.
A note from our visits in the 2000s:
Wearing his trademark blue overalls and always softly-spoken, bearded Martin Mullen looks like he’s just walked out of the woods. Mild-mannered, seemingly shy and yet quietly confident. “The thing about Martin” said Thorsten Melsheimer (another well-known Mosel grower), “is that he loves all his wines as if they were his children.” You need to have plenty of time if you taste with him. An efficient hour-long visit will simply not happen. “Oh you must taste the Paradies Kabinett trocken in 2003”…. “oh, you really have to taste the Letterlay Spatlese one star trocken in 2006” and then the two star…and then the 2004 and then the 2007. And so on. He’s fascinated by his wines, his children. And so are we.
Jewel in their vineyard crown is the Huhnerberg. It is in a protected side valley above a natural spring, near the Buddhist centre in Trarbach. It is now almost entirely owned by Martin’s family. One time, while he was showing us this vineyard, he said that he was hoping to straighten every stake in the vineyard – not strictly necessary, but just as a matter of pride to show other growers who happened to be driving by!
Back to the present (almost).
They have had a label rethink since our earliest visits. Their beautiful label is taken from a vineyard map of the Mosel from 1897, originally made for tax purposes, which subsequently helped to inform the later classification and hierarchy of vineyards. With the single vineyard wines the location is highlighted in gold and GPS coordinates are provided.
Martin and Susanne’s son Jonas joined the family Weingut (winery) in 2018 after studying in Geisenheim, Germany’s top wine college, and internships including Egon Muller, the legendary Scharzhofberg producer of classic fruity Rieslings on the Saar.
Having worked for three and a half decades in their extremely cramped winery behind and under their house in the centre of Traben-Trarbach (on the Traben side) they moved into a larger cellar on the other side of the Mosel, in Trarbach, in 2021.
