Harvested with 5kg cassettes from chosen clusters. They are left to rest and aerate for 10-15 days. The stems are removed and the grapes are pressed. It is left to ferment for 9 days by plunging and frequent racking. Finished in stainless steel tanks with the must and spontaneous rotating fermentation.
CHARACTERISTICS: Mentioned already in the 18th century as a “mellow and vigorous” wine. After ripening, the bunch has completely ripe grapes and others which are still green. The ability of the wine producer is the skill of pressing only the ripe grapes. Ruby red wine with a pleasant flavour of morello cherries and little berries. Dry, well structured, fresh, with a slightly bitter aftertaste. It matches well with dishes of game, red meat, and mature cheese.
Gruaja is a very rare red grape variety
Produced only by this winery...
The story could also begin like this:
One evening Firmino's father, feeling death approaching, called him to his bed and said: -You know that I am not rich, that I am dying on a bed of straw and not on a wool mattress, that my life has been a long lunch of bread never eaten enough.
But I want to leave you something that one day will bear fruit. Go to the end of the field where there are three old vines with twisted and clump-shaped trunks, called cruvaie. Neither children nor birds eat those grapes because they seem raw and unripe. But you go and pick them, squeeze them and that wine will be your fortune and the joy of those who drink it.
And Firmino went to pick those despised grapes, crushed them between his fingers as hard as the teeth of the rake and filled his bowl with must. He let it ferment and after a few days he drank that still unripe wine and understood what a treasure his father had left him and ran like all grateful children to cry on his grave.
No one doubts that cruvaio wine is a fairytale wine from the first taste. Its ancient savoury bitterness, almost the synthesis of all the delicious bitterness in other wines, its deep colour which is the sum of the various shades of red it has passed through during aging make it the most prestigious and inimitable product not only of the Firmino fields but of all the hills of Breganze.
Once very cared for and much loved, cruvaio vines began to disappear after this last world war. Those bunches always full of ripe grapes and unripe grapes branded it almost a cursed grape, which started well in flowering, made a beautiful long and wide bunch with many grains promising a great harvest and which an evil spell condemned, apparently only though, to ripen badly. And the influenced and ill-advised farmers dug those vines believed to be cursed and indecent from their vineyards.
A few knew that even those greenish grains contained a delicious juice because nature loves to play tricks on men, to make up and disguise itself to always be discovered by these few.
Firmino, one of the noblest winemakers of Breganze, was among the first to tear away the veils of cruvaio wine. And he dug long trenches on his hill and planted the new cruvaie made with the calms of the three vines of the fable. When all the other grapes are harvested, the cruvaie grapes remain in the fields and Firmino who with his heavy step tends the winemakers careful that a sudden cold snap does not make those enchanted grapes burst.
And then he harvests by himself, pulling down the bunches that he places in the baskets for further maturation in the granaries. When the stalks have lost their water, Firmino makes wine by pressing delicately, extracting only the flower of the wine for the joy of his friends and of those who will be able to hold a glass full of cruvaio in their hand, looking at it against the light, smelling it and religiously putting their lips on that wine, drinking it in small sips with the sacredness due to a good that had been lost and that has been found.
CRUVAJO OR GRUAJO (in the current exception) exclusive wine of the Breganze area, it is produced in very limited quantities.
Virgilio Scapin