What little I know about Italian wines I know less about Italian extra virgin olive oil. I am on a crash course to develop a baseline understanding. One thing is clear – there is an 800 lb. gorilla in the room. Fraud is rampant in the Italian extra virgin olive oil business. On Sunday January 3, 2016 the television show “60 Minutes” did an expose on this fraud. I have assembled two links as a resource on this issue, http://www.truthinoliveoil.com/extra-virginity and http://www.pri.org/stories/2014-01-31/italys-extra-virgin-olive-oil-isnt-always-so-virgin-or-so-Italian. These resources highlight various practices that scurrilous producers engage in such as supplementing the “extra virgin” olive oil with non-Italian harvested olives or “deordorizing” the olive oil. I equate “deordorizing” to a process akin to what cult wine maker Giovanni Ascione, owner of Nanni Cope, described to us – any wine maker can take inferior wine juice and add enough chemicals to turn the wine juice into a marketable, albeit chemically laced, wine.
The three extra virgin olive oil producers that will be featured at the Krokidas & Bluestein annual wine tasting are small family run operations that do not compromise the integrity of their olive oil.
There are between 350 to 600 different variety of olives in Italy, depending on the source of information. Twenty-five per cent of olives in the world are grown in Italy, mostly in Southern Italy. Due to a temperate climate Southern Italian olives produces many more litre of olive oil than olives grown in Northern Italy. http://www.cooksinfo.com/italian-olives
Piero Petrillo
Piero and Angela Petrillo are Gaetano’s parents. (Gaetano and his father are in the above photo.) Gaetano is the owner of The Wine Bus, our good friend who has introduced us to most of the 41 wineries in Campania and Basilicata that we have visited over the past six years. Piero’s olive grove, located in his backyard in Montemiletto, Avellino. Campania, consists of over 50 trees of the raceve olive. In November Gaetano, his brother Michele, Piero and some friends hand pick the olives. Piero delivers his olives to a local mill, and under Piero’s supervision, makes the extra virgin olive oil. Piero’s annual limited production consists of less than 200 litre. On our most recent trip we were fortunate to receive a three litre tin can of Piero’s extra virgin olive oil. This unique extra virgin olive oil, which is not available to the public, has a slight pepper taste.
Passannante Michele
We met Antonio Passannante, Michele’s son, at the company’s small processing plant in Rionero in Vulture, Potenza, Basilicata. The company produces about 50,000 kilos of extra virgin olive oil of which 25 to 30% is their own and the balance is produced for local farmers (similar to Piero Petrillo). Antonio and his family start the harvest of the ogliarole del vulture and cortina frantoiana olives in November. The extra virgin olive oil is a 80-20 per cent blend, respectively. Antonio demonstrated a five step process after the olives are crushed in which the juice is separated from sediments. Efforts are made to repurpose most of the remains of the olive plant. The leaves from the branches are set aside for
local shepherds to feed sheep. The pomace, or sediments, are used as heating oil. The “dirty water”, which is created at the end of the olive pressing, is used for fertilizer. Passannante Michele olive oil company belongs to a consortium of twenty farmers. http://oliovu.com Antonio gave us two one litre tins of his family’s extra virgin olive oil which were pleased to receive because Passannante Michele does not export to the USA. We found this olive oil to have a slight pepper taste, similar to Piero Petrillo’s extra virgin olive oil.
Tre Olive
Gifts of olive oil will not last forever. Fortunately I read about a family business, Tre Olive, http://www.treolive.com, located in East Longmeadow, MA that imports extra virgin olive oil produced by their cousins who live in Feroleto Antico, Catanzaro, Calabria. Per information on the back of their tin three cousins started Tre Olive in an effort to avoid selling the family olive oil to large companies who often dilute olive oil with lesser-quality oils from around the world. Tre Olive harvests its olives from their groves and press and pour the oil at their family owned olive mill. Tre Olive will ship tins of oil to whatever address you choose. Check out the website as there are many gift ideas, all olive oil related. http://www.treolive.com
We will be tasting Tre Olive Primo extra virgin olive oil. The olives are picked early in the harvest when they are mostly green. Tre Olive will harvest two other times from the same tree. All the oil produced from the three harvests is extra virgin. Primo has a sharp, grassy taste.
