Buoyed by Awards, the Pope’s Official Extra Virgin Olive Oil Producer Looks Ahead to Harvest

Summary

Casa Oilio Sperlonga, located south­east of Saint Peter’s Basilica, is a fam­ily-owned olive oil pro­ducer that is one of the offi­cial sup­pli­ers of extra vir­gin olive oil to the Vatican. Despite chal­lenges in pro­duc­tion costs and demand, the com­pany has achieved suc­cess and recog­ni­tion for their high-qual­ity olive oil, includ­ing win­ning awards at the NYIOOC World Olive Oil Competition.

Seventy-five kilo­me­ters south­east of Saint Peter’s Basilica, the fam­ily behind Casa Oilio Sperlonga has spent a cen­tury devoted to olive farm­ing and olive oil pro­duc­tion.

In a coun­try where this story of long fam­ily his­to­ries in the olive oil busi­ness is typ­i­cal, Casa Olio Sperlonga stands out as one of the offi­cial sup­pli­ers of extra vir­gin olive oil to the Vatican.

The pro­ducer, located in the south of the papal state of Lazio, reg­u­larly crafts award-win­ning extra vir­gin olive oil, and the 2022/23 crop year was no excep­tion. Company chief exec­u­tive Domenico Sperlonga described it as aver­age in quan­tity but good in qual­ity.

“The 2023/24 har­vest will be a big chal­lenge as it looks scarce and more dif­fi­cult to find the right qual­ity, but I am con­fi­dent we will suc­ceed,” he told Olive Oil Times.

Earlier this year, Sperlonga said that based on his olive trees’ flow­er­ing and fruit set, he was expect­ing to reach 80 per­cent of pro­duc­tion com­pared to his best har­vest.

This was despite pro­duc­ers in Lazio expect­ing an ​‘off-year’ in the nat­ural alter­nate bear­ing cycle of the region’s olive trees. Extreme weather con­di­tions across Italy and pests, such as olive fruit fruit, were noted as hin­drances.

Furthermore, once Casa Oilio Sperlonga and other Italian pro­duc­ers side­step these obsta­cles and wrap up har­vest­ing soon, a new set of chal­lenges awaits them.

A closer look revealed that across the indus­try, an increase in pro­duc­tion costs is trans­lat­ing into an increase in olive oil prices, and Casa Oilio Sperlonga is no dif­fer­ent. ​“We are already record­ing an over­all demand decrease,” Sperlonga said.

He said it requires con­stant focus from Italian pro­duc­ers to pre­serve the dis­tinc­tive char­ac­ter­is­tics of all the 500 olive vari­eties grown across the coun­try while focus­ing on improve­ments in qual­ity and quan­tity.

Sperlonga – whose father, Alessandro, founded the fam­ily com­pany in 1953, which was named Casa Oilio Sperlonga in 1992 – and his team rose to the occa­sion by doing daily research on how to improve the qual­ity of their prod­uct.

Sperlonga’s fam­ily also researched the area’s his­tory. His grand­fa­ther, also named Domenico, was an olive grower who recorded their fam­ily his­tory dat­ing back to 1863.

The Sperlonga fam­ily also paid for a his­tor­i­cal study to ver­ify a leg­end regard­ing popes that his­tor­i­cally favored the oils of Lazio, for­merly known as Latium.

The research con­firmed this was true. It fur­ther revealed that Pope Pius VI was instru­men­tal in mak­ing legal reforms in 1778 to drive the cul­ti­va­tion of olive trees and to reg­u­late the qual­ity of the region’s olive oil.

The Sperlongas hon­ored the tra­di­tions of Lazio’s olive oil pro­duc­ers, and they now have a buyer who inspired the name of their award-win­ning oil.

In June 2022, Sperlonga pre­sented the find­ings of his family’s research, together with L’Olio dei Papi, mean­ing ​‘the Pope’s olive oil’ in Italian, to Pope Francis at an event on Saint Peter’s Square in Rome.

Sperlonga entered Olio dei Papi, a medium-inten­sity Itrana oil blended with Carboncella, Frantoio and Leccino, for the first time at the 2023 NYIOOC World Olive Oil Competition and achieved a Silver Award.

“We just sub­mit­ted our stan­dard prod­uct, which we are proud to be rec­og­nized amongst the best,” Sperlonga said. ​“The award is the right­ful recog­ni­tion of our work and pro­fes­sion­al­ity.”

“Winning awards at the NYIOOC is surely a glob­ally rec­og­nized sign of dis­tinc­tion and can proudly be shown all around,” he added. ​“To achieve these results is not easy work. In addi­tion, our high-end L’Olio dei Papi under­goes a strict self-assess­ment pro­to­col.”

Along with its famous patron, Sperlonga told Olive Oil Times in an April 2023 inter­view that the spe­cial fla­vor pro­file of the endemic Carboncella olive helped bal­ance the fla­vor and increased the phe­no­lic con­tent of the blend.

Sperlonga said one of the chal­lenges for pro­duc­ers is nav­i­gat­ing the plethora of award con­tests held each year in every cor­ner of the globe.

Due to the cost and logis­tics asso­ci­ated with send­ing sam­ples to these con­tests, he said the com­pany focuses on the ones that pro­vide the high­est return on the invest­ment.

“We decided to con­cen­trate on those that are really valu­able and pro­fes­sional,” he said. ​“We esteem the NYIOOC con­test as valu­able and pro­fes­sional.”

Since 2018, the com­pany has won two Gold Awards along with this Silver Award. Sperlonga attrib­uted the famil­ial nature of the busi­ness to the company’s sus­tained suc­cess.

“A dis­tinc­tive asset in our final prod­uct is that we are sim­ply dif­fer­ent,” he con­cluded. ​“We are a group, we are a team, we are a fam­ily.”