Luísa Cruz crafted her first wine, a rosé from touriga nacional, in 2018. The volume of wine she made was not high, so not many people had the chance to taste it. At Quinta da Serradinha, tradition goes hand in hand with nature, aesthetic dynamism and a willingness to dream. It was Luísa’s great-grandfather, António Marques da Cruz, who planted the first vineyards, now considered to be old vineyards, between 1952 and 1967. More vineyards were added by Luísa’s grandfather, António Marques da Cruz, between 1994 and 1999. Nowadays, Quinta da Serradinha has a total of 5,5 hectares of vineyards, mostly with red grape vines. In the estate, located a stone’s throw from the city of Leiria, organic viticulture has been followed since 1978, and it was the first farmland in Portugal to be organic certified, in 1994.
The current farm manager of Quinta da Serradinha is still another António Marques da Cruz – who has studied business, not agronomy or enology –, who although having always helped his father in the harvest season, would only take control of the farm in 2003, until the project was formally associated with his own name in 2009. All of a sudden, Cruz had to take control of the business, and had to decide for himself about everything, including his father’s final directive, i.e., that he had to choose a different kind of labels for the bottles, since the project was not anymore his father’s.
In the cellar, the wine is conceived without the addition of yeasts or any enological products, and the wines are aged with no temperature control. White grapes are destemmed and macerate for 2 to 5 days, and the fermentation is done with all the grapes together, sur lie, during 11 months, without bâtonnage. As for the red grapes, the maceration is longer, from 6 to 15 days, in large balseiros (huge oak barrels, holding around 30,000 liters of wine) and lagares (stone troughs in which grapes are foot trod), yet the period between fermentation and bottling may be 1 to 2 years, and the wines are subsequently aged more 2 to 4 years. Cruz ages his wines in wooden barrels and casks, and clay amphores for his rosé, and the wines are unfiltered and unfined, and sulfur is only used in small amounts at bottling.
According to the legend of Quinta da Serradinha, a certain day António II was surrounded by a bunch of bottles when out of the blue someone made a ladybug land on top of one bottle. From this unpredictable, premonitory action came to light the trademark of the bottles of Quinta da Serradinha. The ladybug, working together with the telluric deities of Serra d’ Aire, will determine if one day we will be honored to indulge in the wines of the 13-year-old Luísa. While we wait for that moment to come, we have in front of us the excellence of the craft wines enraptured by the natural magic of her father.
