"We are fully booked every evening," says Markus Hebestreit: "People here really do spend much more money on food and wine than in the Black Forest – and they even go out to eat in the middle of the week!"

No wonder: scallops with raspberry mustard, fish soup with fine fish, veal liver, or tuna steak are tempting enough to make you want to stay. The interior of the small restaurant is cozy and stylish, furnished with modern wooden furniture, and works of art by a local winemaker adorn the walls. The restaurant has 40 seats, some of the tables are in the old cellar, and the door is decorated with the year 1656. The spacious courtyard with its beautiful Mediterranean atmosphere can accommodate another 40 guests, just right for a hot summer evening.

"This was a family project," says Beatrix with a laugh. Her aunt, her mother, her niece—the whole family helped renovate and furnish the farm. But it was Beatrix’s brother-in-law who set the tone for the new restaurant: to this day, the wine enthusiast curates the wine list at “Mundarts” from the finest wines of the region’s best winemakers. “When I left Rheinhessen 25 years ago, everyone was still making cask wine,” Beatrix recalls, “that has changed dramatically.”

Before the restaurant opened, the Hebestreits spent days drinking wine, sampling all the new, high-quality Rheinhessen wines. Their selection now includes around 100 different wines, 21 of which are served by the glass. In addition to the regular wine list, there is a specialty wine list featuring selected red wines, as well as various winemaker’s sparkling wines, noble sweet dessert wines, and even “Große Gewächse.”

The wine list changes every two months so that guests can always discover something new. “Normally, guests come for the food, and wine plays a secondary role,” says Markus, “but at our place, it’s exactly the opposite.” No wonder that Mundart won the 2018 Best of Wine Tourism Award from Great Wine Capital Mainz for best wine gastronomy.

The Hebestreits have since developed close relationships with “their” winemakers; stars of the scene like Thörle and Wagner-Stempel are happy to personally introduce their wines to guests. There are wine-tasting dinners and “Tastival” events, and guests come from Frankfurt, Darmstadt, and the entire Rhine-Main region—and, of course, from Rheinhessen as well. And sometimes Beatrix even finds inspiration for the menu in crime novels: “There was this Lyon-style salad with warm bacon and eggs in one of the crime novels,” she gushes, “it sounded so good, we recreated it for ourselves.” And of course, she adds, “there’s always a special bottle of wine in the cellar that we can use to surprise our guests.”