For almost 14 years now, my wife
and daughter and I have pursued the folly of tending nearly 200
olive trees for the sole purpose of extracting the fruit's precious
"Extra Virgin Olive Oil". We invite you to buy a bottle and tell us
what you think.
Tips For Maximize
Enjoyment
Remember single-origin, small
batch oils like our are too valuable to cook with! Craft oil loses
its nuanced aromas and flavors when introduced to high heat.
Instead, use it as a finishing
oil at the table - drizzled on top of fresh-from-the-oven pizza,
seafood, vegetable or soups - or as part of your favorite
house-made dressing. One of my favorite ways to enjoy this oil is
as a dipping sauce for really good fresh bread, sprinkled with a
few grains of coarse sea salt!
Tasting
Technique
To fully appreciate what an oil
has to offer - place a generous teaspoon on your tongue, coat your
mouth with it and then draw in some air over the sides of your
coated tongue. You'll be amazed by the subtleties you'll
swear weren't there before!
Why A Vintage
Oil?
Like fine wine, olive oil shows
differently with each vintage year, depending on such things as
rain, yield, pests, heat, wind, and irrigation
(or not, as the case may be).
So we put a vintage year on each label, accompanied by our
daughter's artwork. This is largely what separates craft oil
from the bulk oils available in the store. And a vintage
craft oil is, by definition, almost exclusively available from the
grower.
Also, as olive oil ages, its
aromas and flavors change dramatically. When first pressed
("Olio Nuovo") offers strong hints of hay and has a bitterness in
the back of the throat after swallowing a spoonful. While
this may sound off-putting, this acquired taste is an indicator of
the healthiest phase of the oil, when it's high in the poly-phenols
that help lower cholesterol.
As the oil ages, it gets softer,
rounder and richer, until after about five or six years when the
oxidation that has softened the oil goes too far and the oil smells
rancid. Our oils generally reach this stage after five to even ten
years, with one unpleasant exception (which we dumped, crying all
the time).
