Award-Winning Siblings Grateful Father Chose Coratina

Tommaso Infiore, an agron­o­mist and the co-owner of Olio Infiore, cel­e­brated the fam­ily farm’s debut award from the 2024 NYIOOC World Olive Oil Competition, call­ing the recog­ni­tion a ​“wel­come sur­prise.”

“This is our first time par­tic­i­pat­ing in the NYIOOC, and it could­n’t have gone any bet­ter,” Fiore said.

The Apulian pro­ducer earned a Gold Award for an organic medium-inten­sity Coratina har­vested from fam­ily groves in Terlizzi, just north of Bari.

“The award gives us a way to mea­sure the qual­ity of our work,” Fiore said.

Fiore said the acco­lade came after a chal­leng­ing sea­son in which the farmer’s skills were tested to main­tain a high-qual­ity prod­uct.

“The har­vest started very well because, after two years of absence, it finally rained,” Fiore said. ​“And that is impor­tant. After that, the impact of cli­mate change started to affect our olive oil pro­duc­tion, as we expe­ri­enced extreme heat.”

“Fortunately, we have some resources, such as irri­ga­tion, which helped us through. And then, it started to rain again in September and October,” he added. ​“In the last two years, olive farm­ing has been more chal­leng­ing than in the past.”

Fiore and his team apply a series of tech­niques in the grove to mit­i­gate the impacts of extreme weather.

“Adopting spe­cific agro­nomic prac­tices can be ben­e­fi­cial,” he said. ​“For instance, rock dust helps lower ground tem­per­a­tures, as its white color reflects sun­light, cre­at­ing a cooler envi­ron­ment.”

“However, even with such tech­niques on the field, when it does­n’t rain for two months and the tem­per­a­tures are close to 45 ºC, well, that is a bit of a strug­gle,” Fiore added.

While many olive oil pro­duc­ers in Puglia focus on sev­eral cul­ti­vars, Fiore’s fam­ily started with Coratina trees decades ago and con­tin­ues to focus on the endemic vari­ety today.

“We con­sider our­selves lucky, as our father had grown all Coratina trees,” he said. ​“Our whole com­pany is 100 per­cent Coratina. We started a bit by chance because we are man­ag­ing the lands that our father left us.”

“Many of our approx­i­mately 1,200 trees are between 60 and 150 years old,” Fiore added. ​“The youngest ones are in their 20s.”

Coratina, one of the hun­dreds of olive tree cul­ti­vars grown in Italy, is renowned glob­ally for pro­duc­ing medium to robust extra vir­gin olive oils extremely rich in polyphe­nols, con­tribut­ing to their health ben­e­fits.

Since the new gen­er­a­tion began work­ing on the farm, Fiore’s fam­ily has intro­duced many inno­va­tions to the grove and the mill.

“After a short period of assess­ment, my son, myself, and my sis­ter, Angela, real­ized we wanted to add value to what our father had done,” Fiore said. ​“So I focused directly on agro­nom­ics while my sis­ter trained as an extra vir­gin olive oil taster.”

“We tried to get the best out of the fruits of the trees our father had grown,” he added. ​“We started by exper­i­ment­ing. At first, we relied on the tra­di­tional olive mills eas­ily avail­able in the area, which is rich in olive farm­ing tra­di­tion.”

“Then we moved on to more mod­ern tech­niques and inno­v­a­tive means, which meant leav­ing behind ancient tech­niques and deliv­er­ing an excel­lent prod­uct,” Fiore con­tin­ued.

The new com­pa­ny’s first step was estab­lish­ing itself as an organic pro­ducer. ​“Besides apply­ing the organic farm­ing pro­to­cols, we stopped the most com­mon tra­di­tional prac­tices such as plow­ing the land,” Fiore said. Now, we focus on spon­ta­neous weed­ing.”

“In short, we are try­ing to develop a more sus­tain­able approach to agri­cul­ture, an approach that respects the tree,” he added. ​“Above all, such an approach respects the soil, try­ing to increase the organic mat­ter con­tained in the soil year after year.”

Today, most of Infiore’s cus­tomers are Italians. ​“We export very lit­tle, as most of the prod­uct is con­sumed within the Italian mar­ket,” he said.

“We made some attempts a few years ago to export to the United States, and it went quite well,” Fiore added. ​“Still, we do not have a dis­trib­u­tor there that con­tin­u­ously and struc­turally takes care of our company’s prod­ucts.”

While a sig­nif­i­cant por­tion of Italy’s and specif­i­cally Puglia’s cul­tural iden­tity is linked with olive oil, Fiore remarked that the pre­vail­ing olive oil cul­ture rep­re­sents a chal­lenge for a high-qual­ity pro­ducer today.

“Olive oil has long been seen as the unfor­tu­nate cousin of wine,” he said. ​“While wine has always been super-exalted, as it should be, olive oil has never enjoyed such atten­tion.”

“Maybe that hap­pened because olive oil is con­sid­ered a condi­ment, and peo­ple have used it just for that pur­pose for so long,” Fiore added. ​“Even today, many do not use it for cook­ing.”

Fiore believes the chal­lenge fac­ing Italian extra vir­gin olive oil pro­duc­ers is to expand the country’s olive oil cul­ture to all types of cook­ing, empha­siz­ing the value the prod­uct can add to the organolep­tic and health­ful pro­file of all kinds of food.

“Customers need to see that when they buy qual­ity extra vir­gin olive oil, they are not only choos­ing a good prod­uct – not only a sim­ple condi­ment,” Infiore said. ​“They are intro­duc­ing an ingre­di­ent that is good and healthy thanks to its unique con­tents, such as phe­nols.”

To help build this new cul­tural frame­work for appre­ci­a­tion of extra vir­gin olive oil, Tommaso Fiore often accom­pa­nies his cus­tomers to his groves to edu­cate them about a broader approach to olive oil con­sump­tion.

“When our cus­tomers want to see our olive trees, I am so happy to go with them because it is essen­tial for me to show them where the extra vir­gin olive oil they con­sume comes from,” he said.

“Additionally, I dis­cuss our fer­tile, grassy soil, which I take great pride in,” Fiore added. ​“Currently, our orchards are vibrant with the scent of bloom­ing marigolds.”