History of Gruajo

The story could begin as well:
One evening the father of Firmino feeling near death called him near the bed and said to him:
-You know I’m not rich, I’m dying on a straw bed and not on a woollen mattress, and my life was a long lunch of bread never eaten enough.

But I want to leave you something that one day will bear fruit. Go deep in the field where there are the three old vines with twisted trunks and Groppi, called Cruvaie. Neither children nor birds eat that grape because it looks crude and immature. But you go and pick it up, squeeze it and that wine will be your luck and the joy of those who drink it.

And he went to collect that despised grape, and he crushed it among his hard fingers like the teeth of the rake and filled his one of must. He let it ferment and by the end of a few days drank that still immature wine and understood what treasure his father had left him and ran to his side grateful crying on his grave.

That Cruvaio wine is a fairytale wine; no one doubts it from the first taste. That bitter old sapid, almost the synthesis of all the bitter decisions in the other wines, its deep colour which is the sum of the various shades of red through which it passed during aging make it the most prestigious and inimitable product not only Of the fields of Firmino but of all the hills of Breganze.

Well-maintained and loved at one time, the Cruvaio vines began to disappear after the last World War.
Those clusters always full of ripe berries and immature berries boiled almost a cursed grape, which departed well in bloom, made a nice long and wide graspo with many grains to promise of great harvest and that a bad spell condemned, apparently only However, to ill mature. And the ill-advised and suggestioned farmers took out those vineyards believed to be cursed and unworthy from their vineyards.

Some few knew that even those greenish grains brought in a delicious juice because nature loves to tease men, makeup and masquerading to be discovered by the very few.

Firmino, one of the noblest vinificators of Breganze, was among the first to resurface the veils of the Cruvaio wine.
And he dug long trenches on his hill and planted the new Cruvaie made with the calm of the three screws of the fable.
When all the other grapes are harvested,  the grapes of the Cruvaie remain in the fields and Firmino tends to the vine attentively so his heavy step with a sudden cold stroke does not blow those fairy grapes.

And then harvest by just pulling down the clusters that lays in the baskets for further maturation in the barons.
When the bunches have lost their water, they Firmino vinifies by gently pressing, pulling only the flower of the vine to the delight of his friends and those who manage to hold a glass full of cruvaio, looking at it against the light, sniffing and putting lips religiously on that wine, drinking it to small sips with the sanctity due to a good that had been lost and that was found.

Cruvajo or Gruajo (in the current exception) exclusive wine from the Breganze area, is produced in very limited quantities.

Virgilio Scapin