Farmers in coastal Dalmatia cited their success at the World Olive Oil Competition in their call for more investment in the sector.
Situated on the scenic Dalmatian coastline, the small municipality of Pakoštane is home to one of the highest concentrations of award-winning producers in Croatia.
Benefiting from the area’s unique geography and climate, producers enjoyed unprecedented success at the 2023 NYIOOC World Olive Oil Competition and came together recently to celebrate.
Among the newly-anointed NYIOOC winners at the festivity were Ante Vulin, Vinko Lalin and Tomislav Čudina, each of whom won Gold Awards for their extra virgin olive oil at the world’s largest olive oil quality competition in New York.
See Also:The best olive oils from Croatia“We are glad that we contributed to the success of our country’s olive growers,” said Vulin, the owner of eponymous OPG Vulin, which earned a Gold Award for its Antino brand, a medium-intensity Oblica.
Meanwhile, Lalin of OPG Lalin and his daughter Danijela earned a Gold Award for their Dalma Premium brand, a medium blend.
The Lalin family said they were delighted with the award, the brand’s third gold medal this year after it was also awarded at two local competitions.“This is the success of our whole family,” Danijela Lalin said.
Coincidentally, Vulin and Vinko Lalin are former business partners who cofounded a tourism company in 2000. While both men started growing olives independently in the late 1980s, they renewed their efforts to produce high-quality olive oil in recent years.
Today, Vulin has 980 olive trees, of which 500 are fully mature. In the extremely demanding 2022/23 crop year, he produced 3,000 liters of extra virgin olive oil using traditional methods.
“The biggest challenges were overcoming the drought, preserving healthy fruits and processing them in time,” he said.
Despite the extreme drought, Lalin also produced 3,000 liters of extra virgin olive oil with 300 trees.
The third and youngest member, Pakoštan laureate and OPG Celini owner Tomislav Čudina, competed for the first time in New York and won a Gold Award.
“The first awards are remembered. This is the wind at my back,” said Čudina, who has been growing olives since he inherited the land from his grandfather in 2012 and planted 61 olive trees.
Soon after, Čudina bought more land and planted 240 olive trees, including Oblica, Levantinka, Plavica, Pendolino, Leccino and Frantoio. “In the future, I plan to plant another 500 olive trees,” he said.
The NYIOOC judges said Čudina’s Olea Viola brand, a medium blend, features pronounced fruitiness, medium spiciness and mild bitterness.
Pakoštane’s winning producers decided to celebrate their success with the local community, organizing an event at the local Karaba Winery.
Among the guests were Milivoj Kurtov, Pakoštane’s mayor; Ivica Vlatković, president Association of Olive Growers of Zadar County; Benito Pucar, president of Olive Days, a local olive oil competition; Danijela Vulin, Pakošatane’s tourist board director; and about 30 other well-known olive growers from the region.
In his welcoming speech, Vulin praised Croatian producers, who earned 105 awards from 128 entries, the third-highest total of awards for any country.
“We narrowly missed second place at the very end of the competition,” he added. Producers from Italy won 174 awards from 224 entries, while Spanish producers earned 106 honors from 135 entries.
“Officially, with 105 awards won, we are the third in the world, but in terms of the percentage of success with regard to the number of samples, we are the first,” Vlatković said.
However, he lamented that the success of local olive oil producers in Dalmatia is “not recognized by tourist boards, county authorities or relevant agricultural ministry departments” as it has been in Istria.
“It’s time for the tourists who visit us to finally find out that our olive oil is the best product they can take home with them,” Vulin said.
Pakoštane receives about 1 million overnight stays annually, with another 12 million in nearby Zadar.
Vulin said if every tourist bought one liter of extra virgin olive oil, producers would sell 900,000 liters.
Producers at the event added that support for olive groves is also missing from the local governments, except for Pakoštane.
Vulin cited the mayor’s six-year-old effort to educate local olive growers about evaluating olive oil quality and milling best practices as why they consider Pakoštane the exception.
“Respecting tradition, we encourage new knowledge,” said Kurtov, the mayor. “The goal is to educate olive growers to restore old trees and continue to plant new olive groves and improve quality year after year.”
After more than a half-decade, the results are showing. There are more than 150,000 olive trees in Pakoštane municipality. Of the 1,700 families in the area, almost all have olive trees.
“I am especially happy that more and more young people are choosing to grow olives,” Kurtov said.
Along with Vulin, Lalin and Čudina, five or six other growers in Pakoštane said they want to enter the 2024 NYIOOC.
More articles on: agritourism, Croatia, NYIOOC World
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