Four Ingredients for Unadulterated Wines

The best grapes, creativity, a love of labor, and a lot of patience: those are the ingredients from which Leila Grasselli and Dominic Würth in Cermes produce wines – as newcomers from another field, with the greatest respect for nature, under the label GRAWÜ.

GRAWÜ is a made-up word composed of the first letters of the surnames of these new arrivals to Alto Adige. “We have Italian and German roots and have only been living in Alto Adige for a few years,” Würth explains. “That makes a lot of things more difficult in terms of founding a company, but there are great opportunities in making wines free of conventions.”

Individual wines require individual methods. Thus leased vineyards in the Val Venosta are tended strictly organically, with attention being paid to natural cultivation and selected fungus-resistant varieties. And in the GRAWÜ winery, they consistently follow their own path, doing without pure strains of yeast and other oenological products. “Our goal is to get the genuine, unadulterated taste of the grapes and the terroir into the glass: the liquid memory of a vintage in all of its facets,” Würth explains.

Thus what comes into existence are dynamic wines that are fermented with the skins: Sauvignon Blanc, Pinot Grigio, and Gewürztraminer which constantly change and bring forth their very own flavor. “Perhaps not everyone will like them, but they very nicely reflect us as a family and the mountains in which they grow,” the winegrower says.