Cold pressed, extra virgin olive oil is the best you can buy. Virgin oil can vary in taste and colour from year to year because it is pure, unadulterated juice of the olive. Unlike wine however, olive oil does't improve with age. It is at its best the year after pressing. The colour gives no indication about its quality because if the olives are green when they are harvested the oil will be different to the oil from black, ripe olives. Extra virgin olive oils have a range of colours from deep green to light gold and as many flavours, from pungent and peppery to the light and fruity. It's a matter of how it has been pressed and of climate, kind of soil, kind of olive trees of its origin area . The combination of these factors determinates the quality of the olive oil and the consequence is that not all the olive oils are the same.
The origin area determinates the quality of the olives and the pressing determinates the quality of the olive oil you are buying.
The harvest begins in autumn and may vary from end of september to first week of november depending from the ripeness degree of the olives. Harvesting methods have changed very little in the century and hand picking is still the only way to ensure the integrity of the olive fruits. If we realize that every olive has picked individually by hand, this should be enough to justificy the cost of a bottle of high quality extra virgin olive oil. More progress have been made with the automation of the local oil mills.
Two are the main pressing process: cold pressing or hot pressing
The better one is the cold pressing because ist the first pressing of the olives and begins when the olives are spilled in a circular stone vat where the olives still with their stones are crushed from two rotanting vertical mill stones linked by a horizontal shaft. Once the olives are crushed, the resulting paste is spread onto woven mats. These are stacked, up to fifty at a time, interspersed with metal discs, which help to distribute the pressure evenly in the hydraulic press, where they undergo a pression of about 160 tons of weight. The resulting liquid is a mixture of oil and of the water naturally present in the olives. By a centrifuge the oil is then separated from the water. Later the oil is filtered from the impurities. Olive oil produced by these traditional method is the best and naturaler one and as known as first cold pressed olive oil. It is totally pure product and it retains all its natural flavours.
Today, there is no need to spread kilos of paste on mats and stack them in a press. With a different way of production, once the olives are crushed the paste moves into a cylindrical trough, where blades turn the mixture over and over to form a homogeneus mass. Then the oil is separated from the paste by means of centrifugation, which simply means spinning the paste round at high speed.
The first cold pressed olive oil is made from green, unripe olives which have been pressed once and to which no heat or chemicals have been applied and it takes about 5 kilos of olives to make 1 litre of oil.
The classification of this oil depends of its acidity, which depends from the percentage of oleic acid per 100 grams of oil: slower acidity means better quality.For the italian law the olive oil is extra virgin only if it has a acidity less then 0,6%.
The olive oil of "Consorzio Garda bresciano Dop" is an oil with all these features:
Olives comes from the area of Lake Garda, cold pressed and with an acidity less then 0,6%.
A very high quality natural product with a delicious smell and a fruity flavour with nuances of almonds. |
