LOCATION AND CLIMATE

 

As you might expect, olives grown in cooler areas where there is more moisture (rainfall and dew) exhibit leaner, more restrained characteristics.  This doesn’t however mean that great oil can now be made in Iceland – you need a minimum amount of sunshine to make your Extra Virgin Olive Oil taste remarkable, similarly to tomatoes or stone fruit.

Olive trees are sensitive to winter freeze (the Casaliva cultivar is more resistant to cold, hence being grown in the Garda region).  It is also easier to farm organically where the climate is more stable and less chemical sprays are required to keep the trees healthy.

OLIVE MATURITY

 

Here’s the thing – all olives are green.  When they become fully mature, they turn black.
Olive maturity at the time of harvest is a major factor in flavour and quality: olives harvested earlier (green olives) feature more bitter, grassy characteristics, with lower yields and with the highest anti-oxidant content.  The oil is a much more intense green colour and has a longer shelf-life.  In terms of production, milling can take longer with green olives (a longer malaxation - the action of slowly churning milled olives to release droplets of oil - is needed and can be more complicated) but the results are far superior!  Don’t choose olive oil from over mature fruit: it lacks all the potential goodness and flavour.

ATTENTION TO DETAIL IN GROVE AND MILL

 

People who care passionately about what they make and follow it personally every day have the capacity to create products with far higher quality, with integrity, and that taste of where they come from.  They are also able to do this by caring for the environment they inhabit.

FRANTOIO DI RIVA BOX

This box contains 6 bottles of extra virgin olive oil made exclusively by Frantoio di Riva from groves on the banks of lake Garda.

Frantoio di Riva, 46°PARALLELO green label x 3 bottles (50cl)
Frantoio di Riva, 46°PARALLELO organic white label x 1 bottle (50cl)
Frantoio di Riva, 46°PARALLELO blue label x 1 bottle (50cl)
Frantoio di Riva, ULIVA Garda Trentino DOP x 1 bottle (50cl)

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Frantoi - Frantoio
March 5, 2020 In EVOO

What is an olive?

The olive is a fruit, or more precisely a ‘drupe’, which indicates a large stone inside like a peach or cherry. Packed full of the compound oleuropein it is intensely bitter, has an extremely low sugar content and a very high oil content varying on the time of harvest and cultivar.

Such characteristics make it a fruit that cannot be consumed directly from the tree – it has to undergo a series of processes. It depends on the cultivar: most are suitable for milling into olive oil but there are around 120 cultivars that are classified as edible and these need to be processed via curing, drying, soaking or rinsing depending on local customs and methods. There is one cultivar we know of that can be eaten directly from the tree, the Thrubolea in Greece.

 

As with the grape, much of the goodness of the olive is found in its skin. For this reason, hand sorting of the olives before they are pressed is an essential step in high quality olive oil production.