A Silver Award
Well, who would have thought as we planted our first one hundred olive trees as Casa Sant Elia was being renovated, that we would be producing an award winning Extra Virgin Olive Oil. The estate has doubled in size since then, with Chloe and Braz (daughter and son-in-law) buying an adjoining house and land. We now have 618 olive trees, still all picked by hand, and there are plans to plant another 100 this autumn.
October 2024 was a particularly good harvest, the oil had an extremely low acidity, and all the laboratory results looked good. (More about the olive oil analysis another day). Most importantly it tasted good. Of course it depends on the individual palate, but with everything aligned between analysis and our taste buds, we thought it was a ‘now or never’ moment to enter a competition…so we did!
We entered the London International Olive Oil Competitions, where there are Olive Oil Sommeliers from all the leading oil producing countries. They taste and assess the quality of all the oils submitted, and that is after they have been laboratory tested again. There is obviously a lot of tasting as we had to submit two litres of our olive oil for entry.
Can you imagine the excitement yesterday when we had an email “Dear Winners”, in-fact we still can’t believe it.
We have so much respect for our olive trees, they work so hard for us. As we don’t spray they have to guard themselves against the olive fly, whose lava enjoys burrowing into the olive, not sure why, olives don’t taste good at this stage!
They resist drought, continually giving us beautiful green leaves, but more importantly they devour CO2. One of our olive trees can absorb an average of 30kg during the year, so 30kg x 618, almost 20 tonnes!
Not bad eh?
So all in all our olive trees deserve their award…
A Silver for Quality!
Well done olive trees, and well done us.
Irené Avis