National Awards for Harvest 2013

This year’s harvest brought with it many challenges but also brought along many rewards.

While better than 2012, the harvest of 2013 was characterised by small fruit and not much of it in this region while other parts of Australia had a bumper crop. This seemed to be typical of the season in NSW with a lot of patchiness in yield and quality.

The hot dry conditions of the spring and summer greatly affected us, and resulted in a lot of small fruit on most trees to none on others so it was still a quick pick. Table olives were the most disappointing as we struggled to find good sized fruit to go in the barrels so that was well down on what we wanted.

For the oil types, the oil was very strong this year with lots of bitterness and high polyphenols. Although it was very hard and slow to extract due to the low water content and high skins ratios in the paste, we still managed to get some decent oils. In particular we were able to get a very unique Distinctive oil which turned out to be quite successful.

We planned on entering the 2013 Sydney Royal Fine Food Show competition for our Distinctive oil and all was on track until our courier mysteriously lost our entry…which is still yet to be found.

However, we were fortunate enough to enter the Australian Olive Association (AOA) National competition, submitting 2 entries for our oil and table olives, and surprise surprise! We received silvers for our oil and olives, as well as picking up the Best of Class award for our Manzanillo table olives! We are extremely thankful for all the support we have received since we first started in this olive business and are looking forward for the next season.

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