TRADITION TODAY characteristic organoleptic properties of young green olives: spiciness and bitterness.
This is how we obtain our characteristically complex and sophisticated oil with its high green fruitiness and aromatic notes of apple, grass, leaf and almond. It is velvety in the mouth with a medium balanced spiciness and bitterness.
Our oil truly stands out from the crowd and is clearly differentiated from the Island’ s fashion of sweet oils; sweet, in olive oil tasting terms, meaning a lack of bitterness and spiciness, two traits that give an oil a strong personality.
“ Traditional methods are more respectful.”
Spanish olive oil has many ambassadors. Award-winning chefs create 9-course menus from this‘ liquid gold’ to demonstrate how to incorporate the traditional flavour of Mediterranean food into modern gourmet cuisine. Selecting the right oil is an art. Tastings, similar to wine tastings, are now being used to introduce customers to their finer points. There are some 700 varieties of olive worldwide and the oils extracted from them are divided into the following categories: light, medium and intensely fruited. Europe is a major player here, as it produces 80 percent and consumes 75 percent of all the olive oil produced worldwide. Spain is the largest producer of olive oil, followed by Italy and Greece. In Mallorca, olive farmers are attaching increasing importance to the organic label on their products. DELUXE interviewed gourmet expert Deborah Piña-Zitrone about the exclusive extra virgin olive oil produced by the organic finca Son Moragues in Valldemossa.
True extra virgin olive oil is a rarity, only about 20 percent of the world’ s production is of this standard. How do you achieve this quality? When olives are picked they become very susceptible to the oxidation process, losing their vitamins and gaining acidity, which is why they are selected and processed as quickly as possible; and this is where having a modern, state-of-the-art olive press in the middle of our ancient olive groves comes in useful. We pick by hand, selecting the healthiest olives and protecting them from direct sunlight as much as possible and processing the fruit immediately. These are cold pressed in the centrifuge at a temperature below 27 º C, and the oil is kept away from direct contact with the air to prevent oxidation and to maintain the lowest possible acidity. During the growth and ripening stages of the fruit( June / July to October) we treat out trees with an organic Kaolin clay treatment, which protects the fruit from the sun’ s direct, abrasive rays and more importantly protects it from the olive fruit fly( Bactrocera Oleae) which every year devastates organic olive production across the Mediterranean. In this way, with the pampering and attention to detail that only artisan techniques allow combined with the best of modern organic agriculture, we produce olives of extremely high quality which guarantee oil of exceptional nutritional and organoleptic qualities.
Mrs Piña-Zitrone, you have been offering olive oil tastings at Son Moragues since the end of last year. How do you explain the great difference in taste between the oil of Son Moragues and others from the region? For me, what I think is truly special about Son Moragues is the fact that it produces modern olive oil while maintaining old fashioned methods of cultivation.
The agricultural work at Son Moragues is very hard. It is impossible to mechanize the agricultural process on a mountain estate like Son Moragues. But despite being harder, slower and less efficient, these traditional methods are much more respectful of the trees and the fertility of the soil, and so you get much better flavoured, healthier fruit.
At Son Moragues we have also begun to harvest our olives earlier in the year than the old-fashioned way in the mountains. This means that the olives produce less oil, but it is healthier and tastier. We also have our own oil press on the estate, right next to the olive groves. So the olives are truly in their optimum state and full of their healthy compounds, which they transmit to the oil along with the
Son Moragues is an organic finca, how do you go about cultivating, harvesting and producing the oil? At Son Moragues we follow the strictest European Legislation for Organic Agriculture in all our processes. We respect our environment and the fertility of our soil, optimizing our resources and staying clear of all kinds of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. Olive cultivation requires the trees to be pruned during the winter months, and at Son Moragues different areas of the estate’ s olive groves are pruned every year to keep an ongoing cycle which
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