Record Wins for American Producers at World Olive Oil Competition

Part of our con­tin­u­ing cov­er­age of the 2020 NYIOOC World Olive Oil Competition.

By a num­ber of dif­fer­ent met­rics, American pro­duc­ers had a record-set­ting year at the 2020 NYIOOC World Olive Oil Competition.

American pro­duc­ers received 74 awards, one shy of the record set at the 2018 edi­tion of the com­pe­ti­tion, from a total of 120 entries. This year’s 62 per­cent suc­cess rate was the high­est for American pro­duc­ers at the con­test.

Of the 74 awards, pro­duc­ers from California, Texas, Georgia and Oregon took home a record-set­ting 56 Gold Awards and 18 Silver Awards. The United States received the third-high­est amount of awards at the con­test, fin­ish­ing just behind Spain and Italy.

Overall, 35 dif­fer­ent American pro­duc­ers were awarded at the NYIOOC World Olive Oil Competition. Among the biggest win­ners was Pasolivo, which picked up four Gold Awards.

“I was really excited and proud to receive all Gold Awards this year. It is such a won­der­ful feel­ing know­ing that everyone’s hard work has paid off,” Marisa Bloch, the gen­eral man­ager of the Paso Robles-based com­pany, told Olive Oil Times. ​“It is amaz­ing to have your oils so well received by some of the top influ­encers in the olive oil indus­try at the most pres­ti­gious com­pe­ti­tion in the world.”

Pasolivo has entered the com­pe­ti­tion for the pre­vi­ous five years and won a total of 17 awards. Bloch said that focussing on qual­ity through­out each step of the process has been key to the brand’s endur­ing suc­cess.

“We also mill each vari­ety sep­a­rately and taste them all indi­vid­u­ally before com­ing up with our blends,” she said. ​“Many pro­duc­ers do a field blend where they take all of their Tuscan olives and mill them together cre­at­ing their Tuscan oil, but we like the free­dom and the oppor­tu­nity to hand-select which oils each year pair best together.”

While the 2019 har­vest went pretty smoothly over­all for the cen­tral Californian pro­ducer, Bloch said that adverse weather con­di­tions had a sig­nif­i­cant impact on the har­vest.

“The only chal­lenge we faced this last year was that due to the heavy rains at the begin­ning of the year, our har­vest was about a month later than nor­mal,” she said. ​“This caused us to be har­vest­ing dur­ing December and we did encounter some rains. The only chal­lenge this poses is that you need to start and stop your har­vest because you can’t pick while it is rain­ing.”

Overall, the list of win­ners recorded on the Official Guide to the World’s Best Olive Oils is full of famil­iar names and repeat win­ners. However, the 2020 edi­tion of the com­pe­ti­tion also saw a num­ber of new­com­ers being awarded for the first time.

Among these newly anointed was Pitchouline, which won a Gold Award for their organic medium blend.

“This is our first time enter­ing the NYIOOC and our sec­ond year pro­duc­ing extra vir­gin olive oil,” co-owner Fabien Tremoulet told Olive Oil Times. ​“It feels won­der­ful to receive an award after all the work that went into mak­ing our cer­ti­fied organic extra vir­gin olive oil and, more so, the long hard jour­ney to nur­ture our farm and bring fer­til­ity back to our soil.”

Pitchouline’s olive groves are located in the Deluz Valley, roughly halfway between Los Angeles and San Diego. Tremoulet said that the com­bi­na­tion of the unique micro­cli­mate and care­ful stew­ard­ship of the soil is mainly respon­si­ble for this year’s Gold.

“The Deluz Valley offers a very unique cli­mate with a Mediterranean-like micro­cli­mate pro­vid­ing our olive trees a per­fect blend of day­time heat and low night­time tem­per­a­tures,” he said. ​“Right from the infancy of our vision, we believed that the qual­ity of our olive oil starts in the soil and made a com­mit­ment to never use chem­i­cals. We pre­pare our own bio­dy­namic com­post and use cover crops.”

While the weather was not too much of an issue for Pitchouline this year, Tremoulet said that labor costs and the over­all mar­gins at which he and his wife are able to sell their prod­uct presents the biggest chal­lenge.

“Labor avail­abil­ity and cost was our main chal­lenge last year,” he said. ​“It is unsta­ble and the costli­est fac­tor in the pro­duc­tion of our extra vir­gin olive oil.”

Along with labor avail­abil­ity, some pro­duc­ers also had trou­ble find­ing avail­able mills to trans­form their olives, espe­cially pro­duc­ers of cer­ti­fied organic extra vir­gin olive oil.

“The milling was an issue as the mill we nor­mally used was no longer oper­at­ing and we can only use a cer­ti­fied organic mill,” Rich Matthews, the co-owner of Moonshadow Grove, told Olive Oil Times. ​“The har­vest was plen­ti­ful and the pick­ers did a fab­u­lous job. As we did the trans­port, we ended up doing three trips to the mill per day, which made a 13 hour day for [both myself and my wife, Diane], but it was worth it to get the milling done as soon as pos­si­ble to ensure the best oils.”

This year, Moonshadow Grove won a Gold and Silver Award for a medium Nocerella and del­i­cate Ascolano, respec­tively.

Matthews said a com­bi­na­tion of organic farm­ing and har­vest­ing from old-growth trees helps sep­a­rate Moonshade Grove’s extra vir­gin olive oils from the com­pe­ti­tion.

“As we had moved to the cen­tral coast of California, Paso Robles, we con­tin­ued to use old-growth olives from north­ern California,” Matthews, who started pro­duc­ing extra vir­gin olive oil back in 2010 in Oroville, a town about 3.5 hours north of San Francisco, said. ​“We pride our­selves in pro­duc­ing cer­ti­fied (CCOF) organic oils. This requires cer­ti­fi­ca­tion of the olives, the mill and the bot­tling.”

While find­ing a cer­ti­fied organic mill caused headaches for the Matthews, another California pro­ducer has come up with a workaround and brings his state-of-the-art mill to the olives.

“We devel­oped what we believe is the most excit­ing food project of all time, wherein we have designed, financed and built a mobile mill fully equipped with state-of-the-art olive pro­cess­ing equip­ment from Tuscany,” Samir Bayraktar, the founder and CEO of Olive Truck told Olive Oil Times.

“[We can] drive the vehi­cle directly into the California olive groves, har­vest and ​‘press’ up to 500 kilo­grams (1,100 lbs) of olives per hour, and ulti­mately, within sec­onds, deliver the fresh­est, finest extra vir­gin olive oil with the high­est polyphe­nol antiox­i­dant count,” he added.

This year is the first time for Olive Truck at the NYIOOC, which took home three Gold Awards for a robust Hojiblanca, robust Picual and a medium blend. However, it is the third time for Bayraktar, who won two Gold Awards with his pre­vi­ous com­pany, Nar Gourmet.

Bayraktar said his three awards at the NYIOOC serve as moti­va­tion for him to con­tinue inno­vat­ing and pro­duc­ing the best olive oil that he can.

While 2019 was over­all a good year, he added that cli­mate change pre­sented the largest chal­lenge for him mov­ing for­wards.

“The biggest chal­lenge now and, unfor­tu­nately in the future, is cli­mate change and its side effects. The sea­son is very short if you focus on the ultra-qual­ity olive oil pro­duc­tion, since you mostly need to deal with early har­vested olives,” Bayraktar said. ​“The other big chal­lenge is the lack of expe­ri­ence regard­ing some farm­ing prac­tices in the region, espe­cially over-irri­gat­ing. This is a true night­mare if you focus on achiev­ing and main­tain­ing a high polyphe­nol con­tent in the olive oil.”

While the vast major­ity of American win­ners at the NYIOOC were California pro­duc­ers, two Golds and three Silvers were awarded to olive oil mak­ers from out­side of the Golden State.

Among these pro­duc­ers was Woodpecker Trail Olive Farm. The south­ern Georgian pro­ducer earned a Silver Award for its medium Arbequina.

“This is our first entry, from our first press, which makes this Silver award even more impres­sive,” CEO Curtis Poling, who runs the farm with his wife, Tracy, said. ​“We are very excited that our extra vir­gin olive oil lived up to our expec­ta­tions.”

Poling said that pro­duc­ing olive oil in Georgia brings with it a unique set of prob­lems, ones not faced as often by pro­duc­ers in California or Texas.

“Georgia is still work­ing on get­ting a larger part of the extra vir­gin olive oil mar­ket,” he said. ​“We have dif­fer­ent soil and weather con­di­tions. A par­tic­u­lar chal­lenge in South Georgia is deal­ing with the heat and humid­ity.”

However, Poling and his wife believe this year’s award will help put Georgia on the world olive oil map and bring them some inter­na­tional atten­tion.

“I believe that this pres­ti­gious award will bring much desired atten­tion to our brand Woodpecker Trail Olive Farm and the his­toric Woodpecker Trail Route (Highway 121), which is where we are located,” Poling said.