Saffron from Pozzolengo

"Madam, forgive my tardiness, but I was in the field doing a census of the plants and simply couldn't stop..." Mauro Grazioli apologizes, regretful, his voice calm, green eyes smiling, hand extended in a firm and courteous handshake. "Plants," "little flowers," "little animals": at least three times during the interview, he uses, probably without even noticing, gentle and caring diminutives that immediately and clearly reveal his genuine passion and innate kindness. Mauro, an expert professional in industrial automation, is a farmer in the moments stolen from his family and work trips, the same as his sister Valeria, a beautiful young woman with Pre-Raphaelite features who takes time from her profession as an archaeologist to dedicate herself to the care of an absolute Italian excellence. It could be called a second job, if not for the fact that this work, consisting mostly of concrete and often heavy labor in the fields, brings in earnings certainly not yet enough to make it the dominant activity of their daily lives. For now, the fulfillment of mind and soul, the motivation, and the satisfaction of nurturing a unique product in a loving relationship with nature are enough, something unparalleled on Lake Garda.

I arrive at the "Al Muràs" farm on an early spring morning, the air crisp and fresh from recent rains, a church bell peacefully tolling the hours in the countryside between Pozzolengo and Cavriana, in the heart of the morainic hills just a few kilometers from the southern shores of Lake Garda, and a big cat lazily sprawled in the sun on a windowsill, half-closing its yellow eyes, purring contentedly as I gently scratch its head. In the calm of a Saturday in the countryside, Mauro tells me how he and his sister simply couldn’t bring themselves to sell the 12,000 square meters of land that had always been in their family. No, it was not an option to simply sell it, at whatever price, without at least trying to do something to enhance this agricultural legacy, to respect the laws of nature, to align with the possibilities offered by the land, and to honor an authentic and deep passion for healthy things made with love, for places to care for, value, and protect. It almost seems unnecessary to ask Mauro why, in the land of vineyards and olive groves, fruit trees, and, a little further south toward the Mantuan countryside, fields of corn and fallow land, two siblings decided to dedicate themselves to a crop so uncharacteristic of these parts, where saffron is traditionally known as the bright yellow powder in packets, taken by three cooks in white uniforms from supermarket shelves. There is no real reason, Mauro explains, just a great curiosity and the desire to do something different and to do it, he insists, in harmony with the laws of nature, using and enhancing the natural resources of a territory unique in its special pedoclimatic combination.

A deep passion for nature, therefore, accompanied by great intellectual curiosity, first led Mauro to San Gimignano and then to Navelli, near L’Aquila, the Italian kingdom of saffron along with Sardinia and Tuscany, where around the mid-13th century, the Dominican inquisitor Father Santucci, or perhaps Colucci, managed to bring some bulbs of the precious plant from Spain and start a cultivation that still today marks that stretch of the Abruzzo plateau. Here, in 2001, Mauro bought the first 40 bulbs of Crocus Sativus, the saffron flower, and brought them to Pozzolengo, where he tried to adapt them to his land in harmony with a strict and rigorous set of rules, completely foreign to Lombard agricultural habits, to the point where it had to be entirely rewritten to adapt the cultivation of such an untypical product to the soils of the new region. Admiring, I think of the bureaucratic effort that must have accompanied this venture and allow myself to say that, more than a curious experimenter, he has been a pioneer. Surely it must not have been easy to make an entire regulatory system understand, absorb, accept, and adapt to the new reality of this "exotic" plant north of the Po River. Mauro smiles, timidly agreeing that the task was even more delicate, long, and at times thorny because, from the beginning, he and Valeria strongly insisted that the rules include a certified organic variant that necessarily considered their choice—a choice of total respect for nature. At their farm, nothing is chemical, artificial, or forced; no synthetic or unnatural additives for the small bulbs planted near kiwi and Casaliva olive trees. The Grazioli siblings dream of, desire, and demand a totally eco-compatible and absolutely pure adventure. An effort that seems, from the start, to be rewarded by a generous and grateful nature: the first 40 bulbs sprout immediately, producing abundantly under Mauro’s watchful eye, as he patiently waits to see the light purple flowers bloom in harmony with the seasons, with their six petals gathered around three intense crimson stigmas and stamens full of golden pollen. The analysis of the first harvests then brings unexpected emotion: far exceeding the requirements of the regulations, the values of Pozzolengo saffron immediately reveal the exceptional quality of the product and reward Mauro and Valeria's choice to select exclusively, with a process of care, patience, and delicacy, only the finest three stigmas for the preparation of the spice, neglecting—though permitted by the regulations—the stamens with pollen and part of the filaments, thus fully earning their saffron the qualification of "purest." Specifically, the tests confirm values of picrocrocin, the glycoside that gives saffron its characteristic bitter taste, and crocin, the carotenoid that gives saffron its unmistakable maroon color, well above the values required to earn first quality recognition according to the rules.

Care and attention begin in winter, when the bulbs, which reside in neatly arranged flower beds in the open field, near the rows of vines and watched over by freely roaming hens, vegetate, drinking in the snow and rain, free to enjoy the cold but bright days of the immediate inland of Lake Garda and nourish themselves with the unmatched combination of climatic circumstances and mix of nutrients that this land offers them. Unmatched because, as Mauro recounts, the primary contributor to the exceptional organoleptic properties of the purest saffron from Pozzolengo is the glacier that created Lake Garda, whose melting caused a mountain of debris to slide down the valley, eventually forming the soft hills of the Garda morainic amphitheater. A land, therefore, rich in minerals, friable, caressed by usually mild winters, temperate summers, abundant springs that irrigate the soil without soaking it excessively thanks to the slope of the hills that lets excess water flow away, by a unique interplay of dry winds blowing from the lake, and a climate and ecosystem that is, within a radius of just a few dozen kilometers, a unique and perfect balance of Mediterranean scrub, pre-Alpine environment, and Po Valley countryside. It rains relatively little in summer in Pozzolengo, when the bulbs, still in the generous soil where they completed their winter vegetative phase, must stay as dry as possible: every drop of water before flowering is a blessing, but the soil must not become waterlogged before the flowers bloom. The bulbs love the warmth, dryness, and sun of the Garda summer, which cradles them, newborns lulled by the song of crickets and cicadas, until mid-October, when the delicate light purple flowers finally bloom and are immediately harvested, strictly by hand, with a gentle and expert gesture that almost slips the flower from the plant, performing only a small, delicate precision, and placed in baskets, gently laid on the wicker and immediately taken to the laboratory. The flowers bloom every day and must be harvested immediately, all of them, on that same day, before the sun can affect the precious saffron inside them: if the Crocus Sativus bulbs love the heat, the stigmas exposed in the newly bloomed corollas would lose part of their coloring power and wither the next day, so the flowers must be harvested every morning, quickly.

It takes about 100,000 to 200,000 flowers to produce one kilogram of finished product, I widen my eyes in amazement when Mauro answers my practical curiosity. I can only imagine the intense work, concentrated roughly in a single month, until mid-November, depending on the generosity of autumn, with Mauro, Valeria, their entire families, and the invaluable free help of friends and neighbors bending over the flower beds to quickly harvest, at dawn, in the first October mists, the colorful corollas still damp with dew. From the flowers, with infinite patience and great care, only the stigmas loaded with precious red powder are extracted: the corollas and stamens with pollen are discarded in a specific corner of the property, purely to nourish the bees and other small insects of the countryside, but without the golden pollen serving for the reproduction of the flower; Crocus Sativus, in fact, is a sterile plant that reproduces only asexually, generating clone bulbs of the mother plant that duplicate year after year. Therefore, the prodigious work of pollination performed by insects does not apply to them.

The rest of the flower harvest reaches a mound of mown grass, kiwi plant cuttings, and olive branches, under which lies a bed that hosts a colony of earthworms, which Mauro speaks of with fondness, almost as if addressing mischievous but amusing cousins. Only the humus produced by these precious annelids is the nourishment accepted and welcomed by the strict organic farming regulations that the farm scrupulously adheres to. Their work and presence are visible at every step, in the swirls and small balls of soil on the flower beds, signs of a silent, incessant, invaluable agricultural activity that aerates the soil, makes it more resistant to water, enriches it with nitrogen and carbon, nourishes it, and makes it friable. The worst enemy of the stigmas is moisture; only controlled, dry heat can preserve their purity intact—not to mention the color and the scent of grass, summer, warmth, wood, berries, and incense, which intoxicates and almost overwhelms. Thus, as the final stage of processing, it is necessary to dry the stigmas covered in red gold; no electric ovens, no dryers, like the one Mauro and Valeria use to dry the flower petals, which are used in gastronomy as garnishes because they are perfectly edible. Instead, only the dry and healthy warmth of embers from noble wood, obtained from the controlled pruning of trees on the property, is used. These embers are carefully tended, and the stigmas are dried over their heat, which constitutes the final secret of the absolute quality of this Garda spice, as a study conducted by the University of Milan has recently demonstrated. The dryer is controllable, but the embers are not; toasting is always the most delicate phase of the process, requiring all of Mauro and Valeria's experience to ensure the precious crimson filaments are dry but not too crumbly, with residual moisture well below what is allowed by the regulations, enabling them to be preserved in the best way and to maintain their quality, full of the precious aroma that airtight jars preserve and maintain immediately after cooling.

The “Al Muràs” farm produces about 2.5-3 kilograms of the purest saffron per year, which becomes four if the entire contribution from the area is considered. In fact, two other producers, following the example of Mauro and Valeria, help enrich the fields around Pozzolengo with this new “typical product” of Lake Garda, which we later discover is new only in the organic approach and in Mauro’s vision of expansion. As highlighted by the sixteenth-century agronomist from Brescia, Agostino Gallo, in his work “Le vinti giornate dell’agricoltura et de’ piaceri della villa” of 1572—a reference discovered thanks to the passionate work of Dr. Sonia Tonoli, a researcher and tour guide from Pozzolengo—saffron was already cultivated in the “herb gardens” of monasteries that, around 1500, flourished along the coast and in the immediate hinterland of Garda. This tradition may soon be continued by a consortium of unique local producers committed to rigorous cultivation and the desire to defend the excellent quality of the spice. The Grazioli siblings and their colleagues are working diligently on this, with the collaboration of local institutions. Mauro does not say it out of modesty and the innate courtesy that distinguishes him, but it is clear that the true unifying element among the future members, which he will tirelessly promote, can only be one: the authentic and profound passion for nature, the respect for its rhythms and seasons, and an attitude of patience and trust toward it, which will reward this love with a unique product that makes Lake Garda and its territory even more precious.