Olive Obsession
The Monterey Bay area is experiencing an olive oil boom —and that’s great news for both our health and our cuisine
By Deborah Luhrman
Photography by Angela Aurelio
It was early on a cold, dark morning just before Christmas when I got a call that the olive harvest would begin that day at Holman Ranch in Carmel Valley. Stalled for days by heavy rains, the sun was finally shining and pickers were working quickly to beat a frost predicted for that night.
Bundled up against the cold, workers disappeared into the leafy trees and up ladders. They stripped branches of green and purplish olives by hand, depositing them into large buckets strapped to their waists. Bucket after bucket was poured into large bins that filled up as the morning progressed.
The view from the orchard across the valley was spectacular. Two gnarled ancient oaks stood sentry at the top of the ridge as the precious crop was plucked from the gray-green olive trees.
“My parents spent a lot of time traveling in Tuscany and Provence, so their idea in buying the ranch was to plant it with grapes and olives so they could relive those trips they took,” says Hunter Lowder, who now runs the ranch with her husband, Nick Elliott.
The Lowders wasted no time. Soon after buying the ranch eight years ago, they planted 100 mature, 10-year-old olive trees so that they could begin producing olive oil right away. The trees are Tuscan and Spanish, and this year they yielded 180 gallons of top quality organic olive oil, which is sold to members of their wine club.
Holman Ranch is just one example of an olive oil renaissance that has been taking place in our region in recent years. Here in the three-county Monterey Bay area the number of local olive oil producers has risen to about 20. Four specialty oil retailers have set up shop and a brand new olive festival is debuting this October. (See related story, below.)
We are also home to the Santa Cruz Olive Tree Nursery, which supplies several hundred thousand olive saplings a year to growers all over the state. Owner Bruce Golino, who started out in 1994 by importing 100 trees from Italy, says he was captivated by the idea of making olive oil. He is past president and one of the earliest members of the California Olive Oil Council (COOC), a trade association that meets annually in Monterey. When the council started 20 years ago, he recalls, there were only two commercial olive oil producers in the state—Sciabica’s in Modesto and Bari in Dinuba. Now 400 oil producers belong to the council, including lots of small growers.
“For small boutique growers, it’s a lifestyle thing,” he says, “People want to produce their own food and they also enjoy the value of the crop and the beauty of it.”
At his nursery in Royal Oaks, Golino now grows 80 varieties of trees, which are used for propagation. He also combines the olives his trees produce with those farmed in Aptos by his business partner Chris Banthien to make an oil sold locally under the label Olio del Le Colline di Santa Cruz.
Americans tend to think the best olive oil is imported from Italy, but some say the amount of extra virgin olive oil coming out of Tuscany is more akin to wishful thinking than reality.
“Europeans export low quality oil to the U.S. and label it as extra virgin,” says Golino. “They use fruit that has begun to rot or dropped on the ground or has been processed under poor conditions and send it to us, because the USDA has no rule about labeling.”
In addition to falsely labeling inferior oil as extra virgin, exporters frequently label oils from other countries as “Italian” and have been exposed for adulterating olive oil with other types of oil.
A University of California, Davis study in 2011 found that 73% of samples taken from the Top 5 imported olive oil brands did not meet international standards for extra virgin. They failed chemical analysis and taste tests, with researchers noting ran- cidity in some samples and lack of fruitiness or aroma in others.
California growers who are members of COOC self-regulate by sending samples of their oils to the Olive Center at UC Davis, which examines each batch and grants permission to use the words extra virgin on the label to oils that pass the test.
COOC awards the “Extra Virgin” designation only to oils that are extracted with- out chemicals or excessive heat and pass both a lab test for acidity as well as a blind taste test—where a panel rejects defective oils and looks for some olive fruitiness.
Mediterranean ketchup
Dr. Steve Brabeck argues that buying inferior olive oil comes with a health cost as well as poor taste. “Practically all the olive oil you buy in the supermarket will be dead oil,” he says. “It may be good for cooking but has no health benefits.” The doctor should know. He’s been a practicing cardiologist for more than 35 years and this October will celebrate the one-year anniversary of his Carmel Valley shop, The Quail and Olive.
Brabeck opened the charming shop to provide olive oil that’s “medicinally good” for his patients and customers. For him, that means fresh and local.
“There are so many ways you can screw up an oil—if you leave it in the field too long or don’t mill it correctly or store it in a hot warehouse,” he says. So Brabeck chose a hands-on approach, visiting all the orchards and getting to know all his oil producers.
The doctor cites three main health benefits of olive oil: 1) It is a wonderful monosaturated fat that helps increase the HDL “good” cholesterol while reducing the LDL “bad” cholesterol; 2) the polyphenols in fresh olive oil make it intensely anti-inflammatory; and 3) vitamin E and omega 3s in olive oil make it a good anti-oxidant.
As a cardiologist, Brabeck thinks polyphenols are especially important. It turns out the most robust olive oils—the ones that scratch the back of your throat— are the highest in polyphenols. “If you think of food as medicine, then you’ll pick out the best,” he says.
While some of his doctor colleagues drink doses of olive oil each day to prevent heart disease, Brabeck says he gets enough in his diet, using it like ‘Mediterranean ketchup,’ pouring it all over his salads and vegetables.
And since olive oil is a live food, he prescribes buying it in small quantities and storing it in a dark bottle in a cool, dark place. It’s also important to check for a recent harvest date, rather than what could be a meaningless expiration date on the bottle, he says.
Taste test
The popularity of the Mediterranean diet has soared since February when the New England Journal of Medicine published a Spanish study of 7,447 people with high risk for heart disease. Half the participants were put on a low-fat diet and the other half on a Mediterranean diet that included four tablespoons of olive oil a day. The Med diet group saw a 30% decrease in heart disease over the first five years of the study, which is when researchers decided to stop because the results were so clear it would be “unethical” to continue.
Susan Pappas, who owns The True Olive Connection in Santa Cruz, says she’s seen an upswing in her business since then with people coming in who have never used olive oil before.
She loves taking them through a tasting of the 12 varietals dispensed from stainless steel Italian fustis that protect the oil from oxidation. Each varietal has its own flavor profile starting with the mild, grassy Hojiblanca and progressing to the medium fruity Arbequina and Arbosana varieties— which are big favorites—to the more robust and peppery varieties, like Picual and Leccino. “It’s pretty fun. We have a good time in here,” she says. “We’ve been open two and a half years and I still get excited every day when I come to work.”
In addition to the choice of olive variety, the timing of harvest also affects the oil’s flavor. Early harvest will result in stronger, more peppery oil, while leaving the olives on the trees longer and harvesting late will produce a smoother, more buttery product.
Freshness is so important to Pappas— who gets her oils through high-end importer Veronica Foods—that she switches over to olive oils from Southern Hemisphere producers at mid-year. As of press time she was selling 2-month-old olive oil from Chile, Peru and Australia, while anxiously awaiting the 2013 California harvest.
In Capitola, Jones & Bones owner Jennifer Jones—a founding member of COOC who pioneered olive oil tastings when the gourmet shop opened in the 1980s—guides customers through tastings of dozens of oils from around the world.
Another sweet little place to taste olive oils is Trió Carmel. Owner Charlotte Empey, who also gets her oils from Veronica Foods, pairs olive oil tastings with local wine tastings in an art gallery setting—a delicious trifecta.
Olive mill
There’s something about olive oil and wine that just seems to go together. Along with Holman Ranch, Nicholson Vineyards in Corralitos, De Tierra Vineyards in Corral de Tierra, Guerra Cellars in Hollister and Pietra Santa Winery in the Cienega Valley all produce artisanal oils alongside their wines.
Since olive trees can take up to 40 years to reach full maturity, in Italy they say: “Plant grapes for your children and plant olives for your grandchildren.”
Maybe it’s that the Mediterranean climate is favorable to both crops, but one winemaker speculated that it’s because some of the wine inevitably turns into vinegar…then you need oil to go with that.
At Pietra Santa, the hills beyond the vineyards are dotted with olive trees. Twenty-five acres of Tuscan varietals were planted 15 years ago and are cultivated organically. The handsome red brick winery also houses a frantoio or olive crushing room with a Pieralisi press imported from Italy—considered the highest-quality press of its kind in the world. It’s the only olive press in the tri-county area and about 30 olive growers bring their crops to the winery each year so that winemaker Alessio Carli can press their oil.
“Once we are finished harvesting grapes, we switch over to olives,” says Carli, a native of Siena. “We do good work and people keep coming to us because they know we keep the press clean for all the local growers.”
Only organic olives are pressed at Pietra Santa, so that they can keep their organic certification for their own oils. It’s important to bring the olives to the mill immediately after picking, so there’s always a “rush to crush,” says Carli.
Once washed, two 3,500-pound granite wheels grind the olives and their pits to a paste, which is then transferred to a centrifugal extractor where water and vegetable matter get separated out. From there, the oil streams grassy green or golden into containers that the grower brings. The paste is not heated, hence the term cold-pressed that you see on the bottle. The whole process is done in the time-honored traditional way of the Old World, yet only takes an hour.
I’ve always thought that most foods were better when freshly grown and prepared close to home. But after learning about the health and flavor consequences of purchasing old or inauthentic oil, it’s clear that fresh and local is the only way to go with olive oil. How lucky we are to have an abundance of passionate local olive growers and oil retailers to bring us this veritable liquid gold.
About the author
Deborah Luhrman is publisher and editor of Edible Monterey Bay. A lifelong journalist, she has reported from around the globe, but now prefers covering our flourishing local food scene and growing her own vegetables in the Santa Cruz Mountains.
