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THE FOODFILE: THE RELUCTANT GOURMET

LIQUID GOLD The oil comes in a fascinating variety

What don’t you know about olive oil? Well, despite being admittedly less colourful than gangly Olive’s family tree, it does come in a fascinating, often bewildering, variety.

There’s Extra Virgin, made from the first pressing of the olives (a 5000-year-old method done without heat or chemicals), which is the finest: bright, intense and fruity. Then there’s Virgin, with a slightly higher acidity. And finally regular olive oil, a cheaper blend of refined and virgin olive oil, which has no strong characteristic flavours and is used for cooking.

It gets more complicated. Extra Virgin Olive Oil is the wine of this generation in many ways. Like wine, its quality depends on terroir, the soil, the climate and the weather. Like wine, every vintage — or batch produced each year — tastes different, depending on the sunshine, rain and temperature though the year. Wine connoisseurs may twirl their glasses, sniff condescendingly and talk airily of sensing crisp flavours of freshly cut grass, muscular organic sun-ripened raspberries with a lingering finish of horses galloping past. Olive oil connoisseurs aren’t really far behind.

In Australia’s gorgeous Mornington Peninsular, that bristles with vineyards, olive groves and creative epicurean adventures, designer food boutiques stock oils such as ‘Main Creek Grove,’ described as a “single estate Tuscan style oil of the Frantoio variety… with a smooth, fresh taste and a peppery finish.’ And the Robinvale Estate’s, Extra Virgin Olive Oil made from Verdale and Menzanello Olives, grown on the banks of the Murray River. Then there’s Old Cotton Tree Grove, once the Peninsular’s biggest grazing and busiest shearing shed for sheep, today a grove of Tuscan olives.

Agnese Pellucci, spokesperson for the ‘Marchesi de’ Frescobaldi SocietÀ Agricolaa’, which produces the award winning Laudemio Extra Virgin Olive Oil in the estates is Tuscany, Italy, says they produce 100 kilos of olives for a total of 70,000 bottles every year. The oil is a vibrant, intense green, with “hints of artichoke and the traditional peppery finish typical of Tuscan varieties Estate and Olive Groves’ location.” The olives are handpicked and pressed less that 48 hours later, in Frescobaldi’s own oil mill.

Giuseppe A. Pariani, the company’s export director, talks of how Italy has used olive oil for thousands of years, and that every olive oil producing region tends to consume its local products. “In Southern Italy oil tends to be more “fat”, in Liguria or around the Garda lake, leaner. The best olive oils of Tuscany are “peppery” in flavour,” he says. He adds that top restaurants now offer a selection of oils on a trolley, like for wines and spirits. And like wine there’s now the “concept of enjoying the new harvest as soon as released, like Vino Novello or Beaujolais Nouveau.”

At the Montalto olive grove in Mornington, you can pick up a basil infusion and lemon infusion oil, to drizzle over a salad, stew or soup. They also stock black olive tapenade and black and green olive bread. Every new season, their current vintage is ‘launched’ at an ‘annual Abundance Olive Festival’ in July.

Or, like at most olive groves, you can just drop and help yourself to the oils, set in a row on a picturesque old barrel, along with little squares of bread. Luminous, bright and yellow, infused with the flavours of warm summer, fragrant rain and fresh spring, it’s probably as close as you will ever get to dipping bread in sunshine.

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