Creating Our New Sicilian Olive Oil – What’s The Process?
On top of the time it takes to grow, pick and press the olives, we then spend several days every January/February tasting and creating the perfect blend that becomes our best selling New Season Sicilian olive oil.
The Di Lorenzo family grow 4 different types of olives on their estate (The Disisa Estate in North West Sicily), and these olives are planted in different groves around their 400 hectares of land. The individual groves are subject to different weather and soil conditions, and are harvested at different times, thus producing olive oils that taste different to one another. Each year we go over to Sicily and taste each of the olive oils and create a blend of the very best ones. It’s a tough job but someone has to do it!!
-
- Phil tasting one of the oils
-
- Making plenty of notes on each olive oil
-
- Tasting & deliberating
-
- Charlotte tasting the olive oils
-
- 11 of the olive oils produced on the estate from 3 different types of olives
-
- One of the olive groves on the Disisa Estate
It was an excellent harvest this year, and all of the 16 olive oils that Disisa have produced are delicious, so it wasn’t difficult to create this years blend! 7 of us tasted the oils, making notes on the flavour, the texture and the aroma, and then marked each oil out of 10. The best oils were taken forward to the next stage, leaving us with the top 5 oils. After resting our palettes overnight, we re-tasted the oils and then started to create a blend which would incorporate all of the best aspects of these beautiful Sicilian olive oils. We tried 6 different blends which used different proportions of different olive oils, keeping in mind that our customers love our Sicilian oil for its grassiness, its freshness, and its spicy finish. We tweaked and perfected the blends, wrote notes and marked out of 10 again. We came to a unanimous conclusion that night, but we came back the next morning to make sure that we had made the right decision. And we absolutely had. We knew we had achieved perfection with blend C, now to be our Sicilian Olive Oil, arriving in the UK as soon as Mario can get it to us!
We are thrilled that in the next few weeks you will be able to taste this delicious blend of Nocellara del Belice olives and Cerasuola olives we have created. It is green, grassy, and has a wonderfully peppery spice which lingers on the palette.