Gold Awards Highlight Montenegro’s Quality-First Olive Oil Ambitions

Summary

Kuća Maslina-House of Olives in Montenegro is gain­ing global recog­ni­tion for its Mirovica olive oil, pro­duced from the old­est olive trees in the region. The insti­tu­tion com­bines tra­di­tional meth­ods with mod­ern tech­nol­ogy to pro­duce high-qual­ity olive oil that has won a Gold Award at the 2026 NYIOOC World Olive Oil Competition, with a focus on qual­ity over quan­tity and a com­mit­ment to edu­cat­ing farm­ers and con­sumers.

An olive oil born among mil­len­nial olive trees and rooted in local his­tory is bring­ing a dis­tinc­tive Montenegrin iden­tity to the global stage with Mirovica, a mono­va­ri­etal from Montenegro.

In the coastal city of Bar, at the heart of Montenegro’s olive oil pro­duc­tion, the pub­licly owned miller and pro­ducer Kuća Maslina-House of Olives is cel­e­brat­ing its first Gold Award at the 2026 NYIOOC World Olive Oil Competition.

“Mirovica is a very spe­cial olive oil,” Marija Markoč, agron­o­mist, biotech­ni­cal researcher, olive oil som­me­lier and chief exec­u­tive of Kuća Maslina, told Olive Oil Times. ​“It is the name of the place in our town where you can admire the old­est among our mil­len­nial Žutica olive trees, a tree that was lit­er­ally the bearer of peace in the his­tory of our nation.”

Markoč said the Mirovica olive tree, known locally as Stara Maslina, or ​“old olive tree,” is regarded as a nat­ural mon­u­ment. Local tra­di­tion attrib­utes 2,250 years to the tree, and this year, Bar is mark­ing its endur­ing place in the area’s cul­ture and social life.

According to widely doc­u­mented local tra­di­tion, fam­i­lies and tribes in con­flict once gath­ered beneath the tree’s canopy to rec­on­cile dis­putes. The name Mirovica derives from the Slavic root ​“mir,” mean­ing peace, and the site has long been described as a place where quar­rels were set­tled and coex­is­tence restored.

Almost 90 per­cent of the olive oil pro­duced in the area comes from the Žutica cul­ti­var. About 100,000 olive trees grow in Bar and its imme­di­ate sur­round­ings, and many farm­ers turn to House of Olives for access to the lat­est tech­nolo­gies in cul­ti­va­tion and pro­cess­ing. The insti­tu­tion also hosts the local olive grow­ers’ asso­ci­a­tion.

“We are a small coun­try. We will never com­pete with other coun­tries in terms of vol­ume,” Markoč said. ​“But we def­i­nitely can com­pete in terms of qual­ity.”

According to Markoč, the insti­tu­tion uses state-of-the-art milling equip­ment imported from Tuscany and applies advanced stan­dards in both pro­cess­ing and stor­age, com­bin­ing local tra­di­tion with mod­ern pro­duc­tion meth­ods.

“When it comes to tra­di­tion, we should keep our autochtho­nous vari­ety. That really dif­fer­en­ti­ates us,” she said. ​“But when it comes to pro­duc­tion and inno­v­a­tive prac­tices, that is what we need to stand for.”

Mirovica’s pro­duc­tion process is tightly con­trolled from har­vest to stor­age. Olives are picked man­u­ally and milled within min­utes of arrival. Markoč said the oil is pro­duced at low tem­per­a­tures and that the milling process is con­fig­ured never to exceed 22.5 ºC, well below the upper thresh­old com­monly asso­ci­ated with cold extrac­tion.

After milling, the oil is stored in steel tanks under an inert atmos­phere using argon and nitro­gen. House of Olives does not use ver­ti­cal sep­a­ra­tors, and the oil is fil­tered twice, once imme­di­ately after pro­duc­tion and again before bot­tling.

Technology is also becom­ing more wide­spread in the groves sur­round­ing Bar. Markoč said the goal is to achieve con­tin­u­ous and detailed mon­i­tor­ing of soil con­di­tions to sup­port more pre­cise agro­nomic deci­sions.

“We ded­i­cate a lot of atten­tion to the soil,” she said. ​“Every six months or every year we con­duct com­plete soil analy­sis.” Those tests include plant mate­r­ial, under­ground water and the soil’s chem­i­cal and phys­i­cal char­ac­ter­is­tics.

Portable devices are also used to mon­i­tor para­me­ters such as soil mois­ture and nutri­ent lev­els, allow­ing oper­a­tors to respond quickly to chang­ing con­di­tions. Daily data from a local mete­o­ro­log­i­cal sta­tion fur­ther informs deci­sions in the groves.

That data-dri­ven approach also guides tar­geted inter­ven­tions, includ­ing boron appli­ca­tions dur­ing pre-flow­er­ing and early fruit devel­op­ment, stages that Markoč said improve fruit set and over­all yield. ​“We learned that our olives respond very well when you give them boron, espe­cially dur­ing those two moments of the sea­son,” she said.

Markoč said Žutica, whose name refers to the fruit’s golden-yel­low color dur­ing ripen­ing, has often been crit­i­cized for its ten­dency toward alter­nate bear­ing. But she argued that care­ful agro­nomic man­age­ment can sig­nif­i­cantly reduce that vari­abil­ity.

“Some will point out that it might not bear fruit for even two or three years in a row,” she said. ​“But that is not cor­rect. When you incor­po­rate ade­quate agro­nomic prac­tices, you will expe­ri­ence a sig­nif­i­cant yield each year.”

Kuća Maslina offi­cials did not expect to win Gold at the NYIOOC. Markoč said the team believed the oil was strong enough to earn recog­ni­tion, but the top award came as a sur­prise, espe­cially because the pro­ducer chose to enter only the world’s largest olive oil com­pe­ti­tion.

In its first year, House of Olives offered its ser­vices free of charge, effec­tively act­ing as a sub­sidy to accel­er­ate qual­ity improve­ments across the region. The insti­tu­tion also orga­nizes a national com­pe­ti­tion, hosts train­ing ses­sions and works to con­nect tourism, edu­ca­tion and pro­duc­tion.

“Education is crit­i­cal,” Markoč said, not only for farm­ers and con­sumers but also for the spe­cial­ized per­son­nel who oper­ate olive mills. She recalled exam­ples of mills with expen­sive machin­ery that still failed to win awards because of a lack of knowl­edge and tech­nique.

To help address that gap, she wrote a 300-page tech­ni­cal book on olive oil pro­duc­tion aimed at pro­duc­ers and stu­dents. The broader goal, she said, is to rein­force the idea that olive oil qual­ity depends not on a sin­gle inter­ven­tion but on knowl­edge applied con­sis­tently across the sec­tor.

Although Kuća Maslina is not focused pri­mar­ily on exports, it is explor­ing ways to reach peo­ple of Montenegrin ori­gin liv­ing in the United States and Western Europe. Markoč said the country’s dias­pora main­tains close ties to the land, its tra­di­tions and its agri­cul­tural prod­ucts.

With Montenegro’s pop­u­la­tion just above 600,000, its dias­pora, shaped by waves of emi­gra­tion from the late 19^th cen­tury through the Balkan con­flicts of the 1990s, is esti­mated at between 250,000 and 350,000 peo­ple.

For Markoč, that com­mu­nity rep­re­sents a nat­ural audi­ence for oils such as Mirovica. ​“I would really love to give them the olive oil, because this is a great link to their home coun­try,” she said.