In this installment
La Spineta Olive Oil
Why does one oil taste so different from another?
La Spineta Olive Oil
Visually, the land of La Spineta farm is far from the most picturesque part of Puglia.
While often old, its trees—carefully pruned to maximize productivity— are small in comparison to some of the area’s giants. Its soil, while tinged with hints of red, is certainly far from the reddest around. In truth, I suppose there’s little to pull the tourist traveling through Puglia down for a visit. But what makes La Spineta so special for me are things tourists aren’t generally on the lookout for: a dedication to sound agricultural practices; a deep care for, and commitment to, the land; and a well-made, full-flavored olive oil that sets a standard for Pugliese products.
Elia Pellegrino is the 4th generation to manage La Spineta since the family first took over in 1890. Aggressively friendly and enjoyably outgoing, Elia has a good business sense; he speaks English well and he brings a nice balance of confidence, humility and common sense to the management of the enterprise. As we crisscross the farm, he greets long time workers enthusiastically by name, a seemingly simple thing that I’ve come to recognize as a cross cultural characteristic of effective leaders everywhere.
The farm lies about ten minutes drive from the town of Andria.
If Puglia is the Saudi Arabia of olive oil, this would be Riyadh. In its own the district of Andria accounts for nearly five percent of all of Italy’s olive oil. On a quick drive through town, Elia points out the buildings that belong to the various oil producers. Additionally, he makes note of multiple oil sellers, blenders and buyers. By the time he’s finished, it’s clear that nearly every other building on the main street is involved in one way or another with oil production. With a population of about 100,000 the town isn’t tiny, but neither is it much of a cosmopolitan world capital. “It’s a big paese (“country town”), not a city,” says Elia with a chuckle.
The locals refer to the Pellegrino property as a masserie, a typical Pugliese term which strictly speaking, means farmhouse. In truth though, the estate is more on the scale of a medieval mansion than the sort of humble rural residence I envision when someone says farmhouse. Nowadays the masserie here is home to the Pellegrino family business. Set in a square, it’s made up of a series of buildings that at one time served as home to a large staff and a host of farm animals, as well as the family. As is often the case in Italy, the masserie is an interesting blend of old and new. The offices are housed in a building that dates to the middle of the 16th century when it was built as the church of San Giorgio. Inside another building fifty yards away is a well-kept, impressively clean, very modern mill for pressing the oil.
Although there are certainly far bigger farms in the area, La Spineta is hardly small. “The farm has 138 hectares, with about 23,000 olive trees,” Elia offered. “We have a little ten hectare farm which is biologico (organic), and then another little 2 1/2 hectare farm.” From their trees they take off about 600 tons of olives per year, which, in turn, will be pressed to produce about 120,000 liters of oil annually. (Between five and six liters per tree if you don’t have your calculator handy.) A large part of the production is sold off to big blenders, but the best of the oil is bottled under the family’s La Spineta label.
Progress aside, olive growing remains a craft.
As anyone who works on a farm will know, there’s much more to effective agriculture than just planting some seeds and waiting for food to grow. Certainly, science has succeeded in making the process less random than it was in centuries past. Elia stops the car to introduce me to Nunzio, the man who contributes the craft in the fields of La Spineta. Nunzio is the third generation in his family to do this sort of work. “But,” says Elia, “he has no sons so we don’t know what will come next.” He pauses, looks around at the trees. “It’s not so simple really,” says Elia who has studied agronomy extensively, and has worked on the farm for years. “Nunzio sees a tree and he says, ‘it has this problem, or it needs this.’ But I don’t see it all yet.”
Nunzio’s knowledge is at its height when it comes to pruning; deciding what to cut, what to leave, what to trim, what to take down altogether. As Elia already said, this really is NOT simple stuff—Nunzio walks from tree to tree, stopping, stooping, snooping, checking out earlier activity, reading signs I can’t see. There are many options a pruner like Nunzio can pick. The best production, he tells me, “is on the outside of the tree, where the leaves and the fruit have the best exposure to natural sun and wind.” Hence, he prunes to keep the “inside” of the tree clear, in turn, increasing the area exposed directly to the sun.
As we walk he points out how new branches often sprout right out of the base of a tree’s trunk. Mostly these tiny new shoots are snipped off before they can develop. But Nunzio, knowing when to leave them be, sometimes selects a shoot which will be spared and allowed to grow to adulthood. This is a process which, in Italian, is known as pota verde, or “green pruning.” “You have to choose the right new growth,” Elia explains. Ultimately—ten or fifteen
years down the road—the original trunk of the tree will be cut down and the new growth will go on to prosper.
Passing through the Pugliese countryside, you can quickly identify which olive orchards are older, and which have been more recently planted.
The older trees grow much further apart, sometimes twenty or thirty feet between trees. At least to my inexperienced eye, there is no clear code for how they’ve been arranged. The older farmers used the open areas to raise other crops. “In the past,” Elia elaborated, “it was very common to find mixed land with almonds and olives or olives with grapes. Now not so much.” Parts of La Spineta farm reflect this older, less structured planting style. Others show the influence of modern economic and agronomic influences—shorter trees planted in tighter, more managed formations. “Today we plant about 200 trees per hectare,” Elia explained. “But it used to be about fifty. We used to have big trees with more vegetation. But now we prune them more closely; they produce fewer olives, but the fruit is bigger.” In the end, the tree yields an equal amount of oil, but from a smaller supply of olives. This means less harvesting, quicker pressing, fewer problems. Pruning also reduces the need for water, a commodity that’s almost always in short supply in southern Italy. At La Spineta they use Israeli-style drip irrigation; about 8 liters of water, per hour, per hectare.
How old are the trees? I ask. “One hundred, two hundred years old,” Nunzio says offhandedly. As he answers, his eyebrows arch and his eyes roll back; he waves his hand slowly behind his head, a prototypical Italian gesture meaning “at least.” In 1956 there was a big frost here (and in Tuscany as well) which killed many trees—he points to a series of younger trees in an adjacent field. While we’re on the subject, I inquire of Nunzio about the relationship between yield and age of the trees? “After five or six years,” he says, “you get maybe one to two kilos of fruit. In 30 years you get about 30 kilos for this kind of system.” That means it takes roughly three decades for a tree to turn out a mere five-liter or so of oil.
Nowadays, the harvest at La Spineta extends for an intense, eight-week period.
It begins in early November and ends not long after New Year’s. The harvest used to last half again as long, but the picking has been done progressively more quickly in recent years, increasing efficiency and improving oil quality. Elia tells me of the local folk wisdom, which dictates that, “the best oil is from the 8th of December.” Why? “It’s the date of the Madonna,” he says optimistically. Heavenly intervention aside, the date falls roughly half way through the harvest, the time at which you should get the best balance of fruitier, early harvest oil, with the gentler oil from later in the season.
During the harvest, the farm runs pretty much ‘round the clock, seven days a week. This is an encouraging sign in my search for high quality oil in this area. With a bit of hesitation, I ask Elia how soon after the harvest they get the fruit to the mill—I’m hoping to hear that the Pellegrinos abide by the “twenty-four hour rule,” getting the olives from tree to olive press in under a day. Happily, Elia exceeds my expectations: “We take the olives to the frantoio (the mill) to press in 12 to 18 hours, no more.”
Unlike some oils that are tastiest on their own, I think good Pugliese oil like La Spineta is actually at its best on food.
Mind you it’s certainly good on its own as well. But where it gets me most excited is when I use it to finish off a dish just before dinner. I pour it liberally onto braised greens, steamed potatoes. The more I use it, the more I like it. Its exceptionally big flavor makes it the perfect choice for pairing with spicy foods like red pepper and garlic. In grilling season, I can tell you that its full flavor is ideal for brushing onto grilled vegetables, or steaks. For an easy summer supper, just pour this Pugliese oil straight onto just-cooked pasta, along with a little chopped, lightly browned garlic, some anchovies and plenty of grated Pecorino cheese. And I like to add a little at the last minute to almost any full-flavored pasta dish before I pass it on to the table. If you like an oil with a kick, make this your pick.
Why does one oil taste so different from another?
Although we buy it in bottles olive oil is an agricultural—not an industrial—product. Much like wine, the flavor of an oil is influenced by a wide range of factors—some controllable, others not. Although most consumer press focuses on quality criterion like “cold pressing” and “extra virgin” these are but the tip of the olive oil iceberg. Jordi Ballbé, who produces high end oil from Arbequiña olives in Catalunya, said, “There’s so much more to oil quality. Mostly that you get really good olives to start out with.” He’s right. Olives are for an oil producer what the milk is to the cheesemaker. And just as cheesemakers seem to spend ten times more energy talking about milk quality than they ever do about the actual cheese they make, similarly, the best oil producers will go on for hours about the olives they’re using. I’ll go through some of the most important factors in distinguishing one oil’s flavor from the next, but these are just a few of the factors that alter the flavor of an oil. Like a winemaker, each olive oil producer works with his or her own olives to produce a unique oil. No two estate oils will taste exactly alike. Even from the same estate, each year’s production will have its own quirks. The character and variety of flavor is part of the charm and pleasure of eating these fine olive oils.
Flavor varies from region to region.
The soil content, the weather, the climate, the vintage, will all affect the flavor of an oil. That’s why the flavors of olive oils, like those of wines, vary so much from area to area. In fact, many experts argue that the soil has an even bigger influence on the flavor of an oil than it does on a wine. The oil of each of the great growing regions—Tuscany, Catalunya, and Provence to name just three has its own distinctive flavor profile. Note that my focus here is on regional differences, not as is often implied on the borders of modern nation states. People ask me all the time to comment on whether I like Spanish oil or Italian oil. But the truth is that’s an impossible question to answer. An oil from Baena in southern Spain has no more in common with an oil from Catalonia in the north than it does with one from southern France or northern Italy. Part of the fun of learning to appreciate fine olive oil is trying oils from different areas and learning to recognize the differences in flavor.
The best olive oils are made from hand-picked olives.
Careful picking ensures that the fruit is gathered only when ready and that a minimum of bruising occurs in the process. Of course, it takes a lot of work to pick olives by hand. One grower in Spain estimated that “Just picking by hand, that alone costs about 3 Euros (about $5) per liter of oil.” Add in the cost of growing, pressing, bottling, labeling, freight and duty it’s sort of obvious that when you see a bottle of olive oil on the shelf for less than ten or twelve dollars retail a liter, it can’t possibly have been produced from handpicked olives.
Since Biblical times olive growers more interested in money making than in quality have used a variety of techniques to knock their olives off the trees, from sticks to tree-shaking machines. Mechanical means do speed up the process and save money. But they also damage the olives. Imagine dropping an apple on the floor. Three hours later it has turned brown and mushy, right? Same idea. Any break in the olive’s skin will increase the odds of early arrival of rancidity in the oil. Even less desirable is the southern Italian tradition of waiting until the olives are so ripe they simply fall off the tree. It’s a lot less work, but oil pressed from these super-ripe olives is almost always inferior.
Those who do handpick seem to feel almost physical pain when they talk about the torture that mass producers put the olives through. Speaking on the subject, one high quality Spanish producer stopped and said, “Have you seen these terrible machines people use now?” I mention the ones that shake the trees to dislodge the olives and eliminate the need for handpicking. His eyes roll. “Oh no. These are much worse. The growers first let the olives fall to the ground. And then they have these machines that roll over them with spikes to pick up the fruit. So the olives are too ripe in the first place, and then they puncture all the olives to collect them. It’s terrible.” “So why do they do it?” I ask, sort of knowing the likely answer. “The cost. The grower doesn’t get much difference in price for better oil. For every one tenth of a degree acidity they go down, they get another 5 pesetas difference. But that’s all.”
When the olives are pressed is a critical decision.
The flavor of an olive oil changes dramatically depending on the point in the autumn in which the olives are harvested. The later the harvest, the riper the olives. Two oils from the same estate pressed from olives harvested at different degrees of ripeness will taste different. Most of the highly prized oils are pressed early in the season, say in October or early November. At this point the olives are only partially ripe. But these are also the oils which will tend to be fruitier, more robust, more peppery. The typical oils of Tuscany, with their distinctive hints of pepper and artichoke are representative of this early harvest style. Particularly peppery oils are usually those pressed particularly early. At this stage the olives have a high level of polyphenols, which contribute the pepperiness to the flavor. They also add to the shelf life of the oil. Yields for these oils are generally quite low, and prices, consequently, quite high.
Olives that are allowed to ripen more fully on the tree, say into December or even early January, have a higher oil content but generally milder, softer flavors. The oils of Liguria on the Italian Riviera are quite typical of this approach. Generally yields will be higher at this later point of the season, and prices may be somewhat lower. Done well this later harvest will still yield a nice, softly flavorful oil. But carry it to an economically oriented extreme by letting olives get so ripe they fall from the tree on their own and you’ll end with an inexpensive but unappealing oil. Of course this isn’t a black and white issue. And as with all issues there are extremists on either end. And plenty of others still who take a middle of the road approach and press half way through the season. Remember too that olives grown in more southerly climates usually ripen earlier in the autumn than those of colder regions, so a mill in the southern Italian region of Molise may be actively pressing well before anyone in Tuscany is ready to harvest.
The weather will also impact the oil.
Specifically, rain. The more rain there is, the lighter of the texture of the oil is likely to be. Drier climates, and drier years tend to yield oils with heavier body. While regular rain is the farmer’s friend during the spring and summer, in the autumn, drier weather is likely to produce a better quality oil. While drier weather keeps the pests away and the oil content of the olives high, a very wet autumn can be disastrous. Too much rain can quickly cause rot. The fruit can break because its skin stretches so tight from its rapidly increased water content. The autumn moisture levels will also impact the shelf life of the oil. Lots of rain makes the oil “more humid,” which gives it a shorter shelf life. One producer swore to me that this could mean almost a year’s difference in the shelf life of the oil.
The best oils are pressed quickly.
From the moment an olive is picked it starts to deteriorate. The best oils, then, are pressed within hours of the time the olives are picked. Within twenty-four hours is the usual target time. Of course, this race to get to the press raises costs. But the flavor, complexity and character of the oil drop markedly if the olives are allowed to sit around.
The type of olive matters.
There are dozens of different varieties of the single olive tree—olea Europaea—that produce edible olives. Each growing region uses its own varieties. In Italy there are upwards of three dozen varieties grown for oil, including Taggiasche in Liguria; Frantoio, Moraiola and Leccino in Tuscany; Coratina in the Puglia; and on Sicily, the one with my favorite olive name, the giraffa. In Catalonia the tiny, delicious Arbequiña is the dominant oil olive grown; its nutty sweetness is responsible for the unique flavor of Catalan oil. Some estates blend a number of different varieties, in the belief that each contributes its flavor and character to their oil. Remember that since the olive is an agricultural product, the same variety grown in two different regions will yield slightly different flavors in the oil.