Global love for the OLIVE
What you need to know before heading out to buy world’s favourite heart-healthy oil
You might think calling olive oil “liquid gold” is a bit of a cliché, but have you seen the prices lately? Bullion would be cheaper. And, thanks to a series of natural disasters, the cost of authentic olive oil is only going to keep on rising.
The operative word there is “authentic.” Olive oil is one of the most frequently counterfeited products on earth; a staggering amount of what is labelled, say, Italian extra virgin olive oil is not extra virgin, nor is it from Italy, nor is it even necessarily made from olives.
Yet we keep buying more and more olive oil, or what we believe is olive oil. We love its flavour, its versatility, its health benefits. In Canada, we consume an average of 1.5 litres of the stuff per person, per year; in Southern Europe, that number is around 15 litres.
And most of us don’t think too much about exactly what it is that we’re buying.
Orazio Scaldaferri would like us to change that attitude.
“It’s one of those products that deserves a lots more respect,” he says. “Just buy good olive oil, whether you buy ours or someone else’s.”
The Vancouver connection
Scaldaferri is the Orazio of Orazio’s Olive Oil. He lives in West Vancouver, but he grows olives in Calabria, in the village of Piana di Cerchiara, where he was born.
“I was literally born in an olive grove,” he says.
He and his brother Tonino, who oversees the production in Calabria, launched their olive oil only three years ago, but already it has won major awards and recognition.
And Scaldaferri is not the only Vancouverite producing awardwinning olive oils in Italy.
A few hours north up the boot of Italy, just outside Orvieto in Umbria, is the Fiore Estate owned by Vancouver businessman and philanthropist Frank Giustra. The award-winning Domenica Fiore olive oils are produced here, grown on a unique high-elevation terroir that was once an ancient seabed.
“You can actually find ancient sea shells on the property,” says Kim Galavan, the company’s cofounder and COO, who discovered the area in 2000.
Giustra, Galavan and Cesare Bianchinni, who oversees production in Orvieto, launched their olive oil five years ago and in that short time have scooped up serious awards at competitions such as Terra Olivo and developed a passionate following among chefs including Cactus Club Café’s Rob Feenie.
But despite the success of Domenica Fiore and the romantic images of olive trees in Umbria and Tuscany, most olive oil is actually produced in Italy’s south. For Scaldaferri, a big part of his motivation is getting recognition for the region, which he feels is often overlooked in favour of the wealthier north.
“Puglia, Sicily and Calabria produce almost all the olive oil in Italy,” he says.
“Because we are the great unknown, people don’t really see us as a source of excellent products. But the south is a land of contrasts. Being a peasant at heart, I always thought I should do something for that particular region.”
Given the latest news out of Italy, the region will need all the help it can get.
Plagued by problems
Even at the best of times, farming is a challenging business. For European olive growers, the last couple of years have been especially difficult. Catastrophic, even.
In 2014, the industry was hit first by bad weather and then a devastating infestation of the olive fruit fly. Some reports suggest that as much as 75 per cent of the crop failed in Spain and Italy.
“I certainly went through the challenging harvest of last year,” Galavan says. “It had been such a cold and wet spring and summer, and then the heat came in late summer in what Cesare called a perfect storm for insect development.”
Fortunately, they harvested early and managed to produce some olive oil.
“A lot of people lost everything,” Galavan says. “People were wiped out. People had no production.”
Scaldaferri’s estate was hit, too, but not as badly as some.
“Last year production was 35 per cent less, and we were lucky because we didn’t suffer as much as other regions,” he says. “Puglia was hit badly. They were hit the worst.”
It was so bad that, according to his brother, the trucks that came to pick up the olive oil from the mill were accompanied by police escorts to protect them from robbery.
And the worst may be yet to come.
Now a bacterial outbreak called Xylella fastidiosa has hit some of Italy’s most productive regions, specifically the Puglian peninsula known as the Salento, the heel of Italy’s boot. This disease is slowly killing the trees by cutting off the water supply from their roots to their branches and leaves.
The New York Times reports that an estimated one million olive trees in the Salento — some 10 per cent of them — are infected with the bacterium, and there are fears that number will rise.
An even greater fear is that the disease will spread north, sweeping through Italy and across Europe, affecting not just olives, but agriculture of all sorts.
In hopes of containing the disease to the Salento, officials are creating a buffer zone by cutting down thousands of trees, many of them perfectly healthy, some of them hundreds of years old.
You can only imagine what that will do to the price of authentic olive oil — not to mention the incentive to commit even more fraud.
“The two products on this globe that are the most counterfeited are wine and olive oil,” Scaldaferri says, noting that “maybe 10 per cent” of olive oil sold as extra virgin actually is extra virgin.
“And every once in a while a scandal erupts.”
The real thing
Olive oil is actually the juice of the fruit of olive trees that can be hundreds of years old.
“Extra virgin” olive oil is produced by simply pressing the olives; other categories are usually produced using chemicals and other processes to extract the oil. Extra virgin olive oil also has to meet certain standards for acidity, peroxide and taste.
It is both cost- and labourintensive to produce, and, of course, highly profitable, which gives less scrupulous producers plenty of incentive to take shortcuts. It doesn’t help that regulations only require a certain percentage of extra virgin olive oil in a bottle for it to be labelled extra virgin.
As a result, we have a global epidemic of mislabelling, misrepresentation and outright fraud.
So, how can you make sure you’re getting an authentic extra-virgin olive oil? The key is traceability.
At Domenica Fiore, Bianchinni numbers and signs every bottle. Every bottle also shows the harvest date, which is the same day they press their olives, as well as an expiry date. This is key, because olives start to deteriorate the minute they’re harvested.
“We generally pick quite early in the season, early October to mid-October. The flavours are at their peak,” Galavan says. “It’s quality, it’s caring, it’s not taking shortcuts.”
Orazio’s olive oil is also pressed the same day it’s picked, and every bottle bears the harvest and bottling dates and is completely traceable. In addition, both oils have “PDO” (or “DOP” in Italian) certification, an acronym for Protected Designation of Origin, which is an assurance that the oil was produced in a specific region using traditional methods.
It’s safe to say these are authentic, high-quality olive oils. They are also not cheap. Orazio’s retails for around $20; Domenica Fiore is nearly double that.
Certainly, you can find olive oil for a lot less, and it may even taste pretty good. But if you’re paying $10 or $12 for a litre of olive oil, it’s likely to have been chemically altered and to contain a proportion of other oils. As Galavan points out that, “I do believe you get what you pay for.”
The good news
What you’re paying for is, of course, that unique flavour.
If you’ve never tasted a true extra virgin olive oil, you might be in for a shock. It can range from delicately floral and grassy to fruity, nutty and peppery. There’s nothing neutral about it.
One of the reasons you can experience so many different flavours is that there are so many different cultivars of olives — some 700 of them. Orazio’s uses the local PDO-protected Bruzio olive; Domenica Fiore uses several cultivars, including Leccino, Moraoiolo and Frantoio. Not only does each olive have a unique flavour, it’s also affected by the local terroir, the soil and the climate.
“I consider olive oil very much like wine,” Feenie says. “Depending on the region, if you’re in Tuscany, it’s spicy and stringent. I like them fruitier and softer, which is typical of olive oils from the south.”
When the olives are bottled makes a difference, too. Most olive oil spends some time mellowing in tanks before bottling, but every year Domenica Fiore creates an Olio Novello from the first press of the year. (It’s usually available in our market just before Christmas.)
“That is a very bright green oil,” Galavan says. “It’s peppery, it’s grassy. You don’t cook with that because it burns. It is a finishing oil.”
Those peppery notes indicate the presence of polyphenols, antioxidants that are strongly believed to prevent cardiovascular disease and cancer. (Olive oil has also been credited with preventing neurodegenerative diseases and improving hair, skin and nails.)
Both olive oil’s flavour and its beneficial attributes are vulnerable to heat, light and time, which is why it’s crucial that it is stored in a cool dark place and used quickly.
“A bottle of olive oil should last six weeks after it’s opened. If it’s unopened, it should last 18 months,” Scaldaferri says. “After that, it’s not that it goes bad, but it loses antioxidants and flavour. Then you’re only getting 80 per cent of the benefits. With age, it’s not like wine — it doesn’t get better.”
Used well and purchased wisely, good olive oil can be the hardest working ingredient in your kitchen.
As Scaldaferri points out, “Olive oil is not really a luxury item. It is a necessity.”