Strong Showing by Calabrian Producers at World Competition

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

Italian pro­duc­ers fea­tured promi­nently in the 2020 NYIOOC World Olive Oil Competition and com­bined to earn the most awards of any coun­try with a total of 139.

While win­ning com­pa­nies hailed from across the coun­try, brands from the south­ern region of Calabria claimed five of the indus­try’s most cov­eted qual­ity awards.

Stretching from the famed toe of the Italian boot to the start of the heel, the moun­tain­ous penin­sula is the sec­ond-largest olive oil-pro­duc­ing region in the coun­try. While many Calabrian pro­duc­ers have long-estab­lished and deep roots in the sec­tor, oth­ers have expe­ri­enced have more recently emerged, in part pro­pelled by qual­ity dis­tinc­tions gar­nered at the NYIOOC.

“I still remem­ber when we began sell­ing our olive oils to the local mar­ket in our vil­lage, Mesoraca,” Pietro Pollizzi, owner of Enotre, told Olive Oil Times. ​“We would sell a bot­tle or two per week. And now we have won a Gold Award at the 2020 NYIOOC.”

Over the past 10 years, Enotre has slowly become a stan­dard-bearer of the local cul­ti­var, Carolea. Its flag­ship prod­uct, Olio Enotre, is an organic oil to which the 2020 NYIOOC panel of judges attrib­uted tast­ing sen­sa­tions of arti­choke, herbs, pink pep­per, green tea and olive leaf.

“Its unique taste comes from the Carolea cul­ti­var blended with the Nocellara,” Pollizzi said. ​“Carolea is a del­i­cate olive, which has to be care­fully man­aged. The har­vest­ing is done early, in the first days of October, to retain its polyphe­no­lic prop­er­ties.”

Olio Enotre is already being exported to the United States, but Pollizzi hopes to expand the far­m’s exports to new and more uncon­ven­tional mar­kets.

“More recently, we deliv­ered our prod­ucts to Japan and we began explor­ing both export and pro­duc­tion in the north of Ethiopia,” he said.

Pollizzi, who also man­ages hun­dreds of trees in Veneto, the north­ern Italian region, also hopes to begin cul­ti­vat­ing new groves in Eritrea, Ethiopia’s neigh­bor.

“The cli­mate there is just per­fect for our vision of olive grow­ing,” he said.

From decade-old pro­duc­ers to multi-gen­er­a­tional fam­i­lies, the Calabrian win­ners of the NYIOOC – much like the region itself – have an eclec­tic makeup.

The fourth-gen­er­a­tion olive oil pro­ducer, Tre Olive, was among the many his­toric pro­duc­ers to make an impact at the 2020 NYIOOC.

“Our com­pa­ny’s oil mill was founded by my great-grand­fa­ther,” Diego Fazio, the co-owner of the fam­ily busi­ness, told Olive Oil Times. ​“The trees of that farm are still the core of our activ­i­ties, but now, we have added land, more trees and tech­nol­ogy as well as expanded to retail.”

Tre Olive earned a Gold and Silver Award at the 2020 NYIOOC, for two medium-inten­sity Carolea mono­va­ri­etals.

“If you stroll around here you will only find Carolea trees,” Fazio said. ​“While we expanded the com­pa­ny’s land to include more groves over time, almost 90 per­cent of them are made up of cen­turies-old Carolea trees.”

The com­pa­ny’s Campo Dieci brand, which won a Gold Award, boasts tast­ing notes of herbs, almonds, green almond, ripe olives and tomato leaf.

The oil’s name, which trans­lates to ​“camp 10,” comes from the neigh­bor­ing land that was acquired a few years ago by Tre Olive. During World War II, the land had been used to set up a mil­i­tary camp. However, the company’s his­tory stretches slightly far­ther back, to 1934.

“My ances­tors’ first mill was made up of a stone pulled by an ox,” Fazio said. ​“Then came the first engines and new stones, then the elec­tric­ity. Long after, we changed all of that.”

“We wanted to bet on the qual­ity of our prod­uct,” he added. ​“We set up an inno­v­a­tive oil mill through which we can con­trol every step of the process and avoid any air seep­ing in dur­ing the trans­for­ma­tion process. We have deployed a nitro­gen con­trolled envi­ron­ment, a steel struc­ture and so on.”

Another small pro­ducer with a long his­tory of olive oil mak­ing to suc­ceed at the NYIOOC was Donato Parisi, in Rossano, which won a Gold Award.

“We are proud to have won the award with our 1879 Extra Blend olive oil,” owner Enrico Parisi told Olive Oil Times. ​“The name of our oil comes from the year the first olive oil maker in our fam­ily was born. You could look up his name in the Ellis Island reg­istries because he emi­grated to the United States and worked there.”

“When he came back, he was the American uncle for my fam­ily, with new ideas and goals, and he gave birth to our farm and to olive grow­ing,” he added.

The Parisi fam­ily is proud of their his­tory and believe this is man­i­fested through the taste and qual­ity of their oils. The core of their best olive oil – a blend made of three dif­fer­ent olive vari­eties – is the Dolce di Rossano cul­ti­var, an indige­nous olive tree.

“All of these trees are ancient, up to 400 years old,” Parisi said. ​“Dolce di Rossano is a polyphe­nol-rich cul­ti­var that must be care­fully man­aged.”

“The olives are har­vested with col­lec­tor nets on the ground and hand­held, long olive har­vesters,” he added. ​“We usu­ally begin the har­vest in the very first days of October to max­i­mize the toco­pherol con­tents.”

However, the producer’s his­tor­i­cal roots do not hin­der the incor­po­ra­tion of new tech­nol­ogy into the farm.

“We use two dif­fer­ent Bosch probes to ana­lyze the soil and the water con­sump­tion of our trees so as to bal­ance their needs with the right water sup­ply,” Parisi said. ​“One probe and a satel­lite mon­i­tor­ing ser­vice allows us to mon­i­tor the pho­to­syn­thetic index and the quan­tity of bio­mass in the soil.”

The other cul­ti­vars that con­tribute to the oil are Nocellara and Tondina. To the experts of the 2020 NYIOOC panel, the 1879 Extra Blend offers tast­ing sen­sa­tions of arti­choke, radish, arugula and chicory.

About 55 miles south of the groves of the Parisi fam­ily, the award-win­ning Azienda Agricola Arcobaleno pro­duces its extra vir­gin olive oil, near the town of Squillace.

“Our farm is 450 meters (1,500 feet) above sea level, in a remote area, far away from any pol­lut­ing source,” owner Anita Regenass Frisina told Olive Oil Times. ​“The right alti­tude, tem­per­a­tures and expo­sure to the wind all con­tributes to the opti­mal grow­ing of our plants: typ­i­cal Mediterranean trees.”

Regenass Frisina earned a Silver Award for her Olio Frisina, a medium mono­va­ri­etal.

“The oil comes from the Carolea cul­ti­var, an olive tree vari­ety that man­i­fests its best qual­i­ties between the Ionian and Tyrrhenian seas,” said Regenass Frisina, who started pro­duc­ing olive oil in 1995.

Her com­pany man­ages around 3,500 trees, which were planted by the fam­ily in recent years beside cen­turies-old trees. Regenass Frisina attrib­uted part of her suc­cess to pair­ing these ancient trees and tra­di­tional har­vest­ing tech­niques with mod­ern tech­nol­ogy.

“Our oil mill adopts the lat­est olive trans­for­ma­tion tech­nolo­gies, with non-cor­ro­sive stain­less steel tanks, con­trolled tem­per­a­ture and no con­tact with oxy­gen,” she said. ​“Harvesting is done man­u­ally and the olives are processed within two to three hours.”