From Whisky to Olive Oil, Bozelli Boss Highlights the Value of Skillful Blending

Summary

Bozelli founder Mustafa Birhan Hazer was inspired by the whisky indus­try to cre­ate highly cus­tomiz­able extra vir­gin olive oil blends, using select olive vari­eties and expert blend­ing tech­niques. Despite fac­ing chal­lenges due to cli­mate change, Hazer’s ded­i­ca­tion to qual­ity and inno­va­tion has led Bozelli to win Gold Awards and con­tribute to the grow­ing aware­ness and appre­ci­a­tion of high-qual­ity olive oil in Turkey.

“My inspi­ra­tion came from the whisky indus­try, which I was part of after 2001,” Bozelli founder Mustafa Birhan Hazer told Olive Oil Times.

“I know that sin­gle malts are excel­lent. But, while they are great on their own, when a mas­ter blends them, you can achieve such a com­plex and rich blend greater than the sum of its parts,” he said. ​“Of course, it is an art; you need tal­ent.”

The pur­suit of highly cus­tomiz­able extra vir­gin olive oil blends has led the award-win­ning pro­ducer to plant select olive vari­eties since it started oper­a­tions in 2010.

“The choice of vari­eties gives us absolute unique­ness in our blends and ​‘sin­gle malts,’ if I may call them that,” Hazer said. ​“We cus­tom-design blends for our busi­ness part­ners as well, to busi­ness own­ers who pre­fer a world-class olive oil which is unique to them.”

Bozelli also cul­ti­vates the most pop­u­lar local vari­eties, includ­ing Domat, Edremit and Gemlik, along with Arbequina, Arbosana, Koroneiki and Picual.

Two hybrid vari­eties – Skitita, a Picual and Arbequina hybrid, and Lecciana, a Leccino and Arbosana hybrid – were planted later. Both are highly adapt­able and were orig­i­nally devel­oped for super-high-den­sity (super-inten­sive) olive grow­ing.

“All of these cul­ti­vars cover a wide range of choices for us,” Hazer said. ​“Some pro­duce del­i­cate extra vir­gin olive oil, while oth­ers are more robust. Some of them are more flo­ral. Some are well known for their high polyphe­nol con­tent.”

Today, Bozelli man­ages around 21,000 olive trees cul­ti­vated on more than 40 hectares. Hazer said the key to the company’s olive blend­ing suc­cess is his wife, Esra.

“My wife received train­ing in Turkey and Italy to mas­ter tast­ing and blend­ing,” he said. ​“She is the nose and the mas­ter blender of our olive oils.”

While the Bozelli brand was estab­lished in 2010, the com­pany has older roots; Hazer’s grand­fa­ther began grow­ing and milling olives in the first half of the 20^th cen­tury.

“He was a tal­ented mechanic and built many olive mills in the young Turkish repub­lic back then,” said Hazer, adding that his grand­fa­ther heav­ily influ­enced him and the com­pany.

“My grand­fa­ther used to say that the olive tree loves the wind, sun, stone and steep hills,” said Hazer, whose groves are 500 to 600 meters above sea level. ​“We chose an inland area of the Aegean Region. I chose a higher alti­tude because ingre­di­ents for spir­its tend to taste bet­ter when sub­jected to con­trolled cli­matic stress.”

The olive groves are located on the out­skirts of Bozburun, a vil­lage in Manisa province known for its hills and winds. ​“It gets 300 days of sun­shine each year on aver­age, and the soil is sandy with many stones,” Hazer said. ​“The ele­va­tion helps us with daily tem­per­a­ture fluc­tu­a­tions and man­aged water stress from our irri­ga­tion.”

All Bozelli olive trees are irri­gated fol­low­ing a spe­cific pro­to­col. ​“We try to opti­mize quan­tity and qual­ity by apply­ing deficit irri­ga­tion tech­niques after pit for­ma­tion until pulp’s build-up stage begins, some­time in August,” Hazer said.

As the sea­son approaches its end, and depend­ing on tem­per­a­tures, irri­ga­tion com­pletely halts at least two weeks before har­vest.

Bozelli is also devel­op­ing fer­ti­ga­tion tech­niques in which nutri­ents nec­es­sary for the olive trees are dis­solved into the water. Hazer said deter­min­ing the cor­rect dosage and best time to fer­ti­gate are his main chal­lenges.

“We are exper­i­ment­ing and improv­ing every year,” he added. ​“It is doing won­ders for our extra vir­gin olive oils.”

One of the two Gold Awards won at the 2023 NYIOOC World Olive Oil Competition was for Bozelli’s Picual mono­va­ri­etal. The Spanish olive is grown at all lat­i­tudes and is respon­si­ble for a sig­nif­i­cant per­cent­age of global olive oil pro­duc­tion. Bozelli’s Koroneiki mono­va­ri­etal earned the other Gold Award.

“I found just one sam­ple of Picual in 2012, we pop­u­lated it, and now we pro­duce the only Picual olive oil in the whole of Turkey,” Hazer said. ​“Given its sta­tus as one of the world’s most awarded vari­eties, it was our inter­est to intro­duce it to Turkey right from the start.”

“It is a bal­anced, robust extra vir­gin olive oil with a long fin­ish,” he added. ​“It expresses notes of peach first and then apri­cot, tomato and black pep­per in the back­ground.”

The Gold Awards came after a chal­leng­ing sea­son for the Turkish pro­ducer. ​“It was a tough sea­son,” Hazer con­firmed.

“Every sea­son comes with a new story, dri­ven by cli­mate change,” he added. ​“In March 2022, in the sec­ond half of the month, after the trees ​‘woke up’ for spring, our area was sub­ject to tem­per­a­tures around ‑5°C or ‑7°C every night. It was near freez­ing dur­ing the day.”

In the Aegean region, March 2022 was the coolest March of the last 40 years. ​“This caused dam­age, and the har­vest was low,” Hazer said.

“And then, sum­mer came with extreme heat,” he added. ​“We coped with it also thanks to the wells and drip irri­ga­tion net­works in our groves.”

However, the com­ing sea­son’s lead-up is quite dif­fer­ent from last year. ​“Unlike Spain, Turkey is hav­ing a wet spring, which is great news for us,” Hazer said. ​“As we have not yet even entered the flow­er­ing stage, it is hard to pre­dict the har­vest at this stage, but we have rea­son to be hope­ful.”

“The chal­lenge for us is to man­age humid­ity and squeeze in foliar appli­ca­tions of micro-ele­ments into dry breaks, which has become part of the rea­son for our oil qual­ity,” he added.

Hazer sees a bright future for high-qual­ity olive oil pro­duc­tion in Turkey, a coun­try whose long-stand­ing olive farm­ing tra­di­tion dates back to the ancient Romans’ pres­ence there.

“Today, with many new bou­tique brands like Bozelli, aware­ness, inter­est and appre­ci­a­tion of top olive oil qual­ity among con­sumers is grow­ing in Turkey,” he said.

“This trend of improved olive oil qual­ity we observe in the num­ber of awards Turkish brands get in NYIOOC over the years,” Hazer added. In 2023, Turkey’s olive oil pro­duc­ers earned 74 awards, nine more than they did in 2022 and 30 more than in 2021.

“Consumers are increas­ingly curi­ous and try­ing bet­ter qual­ity olive oils,” Hazer said. ​“Many begin to build their knowl­edge about this liq­uid like they do for wine or vine­gar. We believe that this is the begin­ning of a new era, and we are happy to be at the fore­front of that jour­ney with our vari­eties.”