From His Sandy Perch, Domenica Fiore's Cesare Bianchini Aims Even Higher

Domenica Fiore orchards lie on gen­tle slopes over­look­ing the city of Orvieto. This expo­sure is prob­a­bly one of the fac­tors that has led to the cre­ation of great extra vir­gin olive oils over the years. Today, they come from 10,000 Leccino, Moraiolo, Frantoio and Canino trees between 25 and 70 years of age.

“Our prod­ucts are the fruit of care and ded­i­ca­tion, but nature also plays a fun­da­men­tal role in qual­ity,” said the skill­ful pro­ducer Cesare Bianchini after the com­pa­ny’s stun­ning suc­cess at the 2017 NYIOOC.
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Domenica Fiore’s story began around the year 2000, when he man­aged some olive trees with Kim Galavan in Orvieto. Intending to go beyond the min­i­mum tar­gets of yield and quan­tity, he started to deepen the dif­fer­ent atti­tudes of vari­eties and to study all of the fac­tors deter­min­ing the final result. He attended courses and became a skilled taster.

Meanwhile, Galavan intro­duced Bianchini to the Canadian busi­ness­man Frank Giustra, who sent the Orvieto oils to his friends as Christmas gifts every year.

One day, Giustra offered a blind tast­ing for pop­u­lar Canadian chefs. Bianchini’s oil was voted the best, and from that moment, they started talk­ing about a part­ner­ship to main­tain high qual­ity and larger quan­ti­ties. The team also con­sid­ered pur­chas­ing new farm­land.

In 2010, Domenica Fiore offi­cially started with five olive groves.

“Our basic phi­los­o­phy was that we should make the best extra vir­gin olive oil and I knew we could do a good job, but I was skep­ti­cal,” Bianchini said, reveal­ing that his doubts dis­ap­peared when in 2013, they par­tic­i­pated in the first edi­tion of NYIOOC and achieved a Best in Class with Olio Reserva.

“It was not only a great sat­is­fac­tion but a real turn­ing point,” Bianchini said, try­ing to explain the excite­ment of those days.

Then, at the 2014 NYIOOC, they won two Gold Awards with Olio Reserva and Olio Novello and a Best in Class with Olio Monaco. ​“I knew at that point that our qual­ity was a cer­tainty,” he unpre­ten­tiously affirmed.

After another great sea­son in 2016, crowned with three Gold Awards, Domenica Fiore had a stag­ger­ing suc­cess at the 2017 NYIOOC, obtain­ing four Golds with Olio Classico, Olio Novello, Olio Monaco and Olio Veritas and a Best in Class with Olio Reserva.

We drove through the farm, where olive groves alter­nate with vine­yards and woods of tall trees. Oaks, holm oaks, chest­nuts and other Mediterranean trees and plants cre­ate an ideal micro­cli­mate and con­sti­tute a nat­ural bar­rier to any treat­ments used by farm­ers nearby.

We went up the hill to almost 500 meters (1,640 feet) above sea level, enjoy­ing the won­der­ful view and the par­tic­u­lar appear­ance of olive trees due to a light layer of kaolin. It was recently sprayed to help limit the olive fly’s attack and dampen the expo­sure to the sun.

You feel roots embed­ded in a beach as you go among the olive trees. The tex­ture of the soil is fine and sandy, com­posed of a gen­tly yel­low­ish-white pow­der that dusts your shoes like it is dry sand. But most sur­pris­ingly, the ground is extra­or­di­nar­ily sprin­kled with seashell frag­ments.

At that moment, I under­stood the rea­son for the pat­tern on the labels of Domenica Fiore’s bot­tles — olive trees orig­i­nate from a ground made up of these sea crea­tures.

Once, there used to be a seashore here. While Bianchini bent down to show me the par­tic­u­lar debris that prob­a­bly dates back to Plio-Pleistocene, we noted some­thing that was stick­ing out from the ground. We del­i­cately dug it up and dis­cov­ered an intact and well-pre­served fos­sil bivalve mol­lusk of about 15 cen­time­ters (6 inches).

It was extra­or­di­nary to come face to face with this wit­ness to the ori­gins and breathe the sea air of a coast mil­lions of years ago lived in these lands, now sev­eral miles away from the sea. Many fos­sil frag­ments and min­er­als now con­sti­tute and enrich this sandy and well-drained soil.

“Environment must be respected — this posi­tion and these char­ac­ter­is­tics pro­vide us the ideal con­di­tions to carry out an even more respect­ful man­age­ment of our olive groves,” said Bianchini. ​“We con­duct an organic man­age­ment, reusing prun­ing remains as well as milling byprod­ucts to fer­til­ize the ground, cre­at­ing a vir­tu­ous closed cir­cle,” he explained.

“To main­tain a very high qual­ity requires high costs but gives great sat­is­fac­tion,” the pro­ducer affirmed. He spec­i­fied that they har­vest based on vari­eties and then blend the dif­fer­ent mono­va­ri­etals in dif­fer­ent per­cent­ages. ​“I per­son­ally take care of this aspect and try to main­tain a bal­ance in the sen­so­r­ial aspect of extra vir­gin olive oils over the years,” he pointed out.

The extracted oil is imme­di­ately stored and con­di­tioned with nitro­gen. They adopted a spe­cial stain­less-steel bot­tle devel­oped by the University of Florence in col­lab­o­ra­tion with Marco Mugelli. It allows opti­mal preser­va­tion, com­pletely avoid­ing oxi­da­tion, and it is now their dis­tinc­tive image. In addi­tion, all the bot­tles are num­bered and signed by Cesare Bianchini, the com­pa­ny’s farmer.

As we go down the hill, we stop at a nice build­ing under con­struc­tion, which will host a new mill within a month.

“Domenica Fiore was born as the story of three friends, and then became a story of pas­sion and qual­ity,” said Kim Galavan, reached on the phone in Vancouver.

“I can’t wait to see the work of the new facil­ity,” she said, adding that she will be here in time for the har­vest. ​“What I see about Domenica Fiore is pas­sion and com­mit­ment to pro­duce only the very best with hard work, every year, with­out com­pro­mise,” she said.

“Harvest is our favorite time of the year. There is noth­ing more excit­ing than being present at the first extrac­tion of olive oil. It comes out in its bril­liant, green emer­ald color, while every­one is star­ing at that new prod­uct pour­ing out, wait­ing to taste the fruit of a year of hard but pas­sion­ate work.”

Behind the name of Domenica Fiore is Frank Giustra’s mother. She is Italian, from Calabria…and very proud.