Gironde’s First Commercial Mill Opens for Business

Summary

Bernard Saïn pro­duced the first olive oil from his grove in Gironde for com­mer­cial sale after plant­ing olive trees in 2018 upon retire­ment. Saïn over­came chal­lenges due to the region’s cli­mate and ter­rain, and his suc­cess has inspired other farm­ers in the area to con­sider diver­si­fy­ing into olive cul­ti­va­tion.

In the south­west­ern French depart­ment of Gironde, Bernard Saïn has pro­duced the first olive oil from his grove to be sold com­mer­cially. 

Despite his fam­i­ly’s own­er­ship of olive trees and hav­ing been millers since 1903, Saïn did not plant his first olive trees until 2018, when he retired.

“I was an arbori­cul­tur­ist in south­ern France until 2000,” he told Olive Oil Times. ​“A series of floods — I was liv­ing on an island in the Rhône — forced me to leave and move to the south­west.” 

“When I was approach­ing retire­ment in 2017, my wife sug­gested plant­ing olive trees to occupy my time,” Saïn added. ​“That’s how this adven­ture began.”

Along with his wife, Françoise, he planted the olive grove in Aillas, about 50 kilo­me­ters south­east of Bordeaux. 

Over the next three years, they planted over 600 Picholine, Aglandau, Cayon and Bouteillan olive trees. 

Saïn also built Gironde’s first olive oil mill, cre­at­ing a hub for local pro­duc­tion. After the recent har­vest, the cou­ple sold olive oil com­mer­cially for the first time.

Gironde is known for its tem­per­ate cli­mate, where tem­per­a­tures sel­dom fall below freez­ing, and sum­mers are rel­a­tively mild, rarely exceed­ing 30 ºC. 

The region typ­i­cally records an annual rain­fall of 355 mil­lime­ters, but the pre­cip­i­ta­tion has increased dra­mat­i­cally in recent years. 

“We had heavy rain­fall — 1,100 mil­lime­ters over two con­sec­u­tive years — which has led to issues like fun­gal dis­eases,” Saïn said. ​“Additionally, the ter­rain is dif­fi­cult to man­age due to clay in the sub­soil.”

To over­come these obsta­cles, Saïn took steps to adapt the land. ​“I had to shape the land by cre­at­ing raised earth mounds to pro­tect the roots of the olive trees from excess water and pre­vent root asphyx­i­a­tion,” he said. 

“After los­ing 120 trees two years after plant­ing them on soil I was unfa­mil­iar with — being new to the region — I had to rethink my approach,” Saïn added. ​“Interestingly, later on, locals told me that they also used raised mounds for sow­ing cere­als, which rein­forced the via­bil­ity of this method.”

Saïn recounted the skep­ti­cism he faced in the early days of his project. 

“In 2018, when we planted the first 200 trees, peo­ple thought we were crazy — city folk try­ing to do some­thing that had never existed here,” he said. ​“Everyone was likely expect­ing us to crash and burn.

“But now, two or three years later, we’ve become pio­neers, and the way peo­ple see us has com­pletely changed,” Saïn added. ​“The chal­lenges in the wine indus­try have even prompted local wine­grow­ers to won­der if they can diver­sify into olive cul­ti­va­tion.”

Looking toward the future, Saïn said he plans to plant another 300 trees of a range of vari­eties to see how they fare com­pared to tra­di­tional French olives.

“Since we have our mill, we’re fully autonomous, and our pro­duc­tion will con­tinue to increase every year,” he said. ​“We’ve already started direct sales through short dis­tri­b­u­tion chan­nels, and next year, we plan to develop e‑commerce to reach even more cus­tomers.”

Along with milling olives from his grove, Saïn also allows local res­i­dents to bring their fruit for press­ing. He said the ini­tia­tive fos­ters the prin­ci­ple of ​“pro­duce local, con­sume local” while pre­serv­ing tra­di­tional agri­cul­tural prac­tices.

Fellow new olive grow­ers may soon join Saïn. While the region is tra­di­tion­ally known for its vine­yards and fine wines, pro­ducer asso­ci­a­tion France Olive has iden­ti­fied Gironde as an inter­est­ing place for new olive groves.

Already, wine pro­duc­ers strug­gling after sev­eral years of poor har­vests have iden­ti­fied grow­ing olive trees as a way to diver­sify their oper­a­tions. 

“There’s a wine cri­sis in the Bordeaux region among small wine pro­duc­ers who are faced with an uncer­tain cash flow and unsold wine stocks,” Hélène Lasserre, France Olive’s direc­tor of con­ser­va­tion and research, told Olive Oil Times in a 2023 inter­view.

However, given the uncer­tainty of poten­tial prof­itabil­ity, con­vinc­ing wine­grow­ers to com­mit years of effort and sig­nif­i­cant finan­cial resources to cul­ti­vat­ing olive trees and estab­lish­ing a mill remains chal­leng­ing. 

Even so, Saïn’s deci­sion to grow olive trees in a less tra­di­tional region is part of a broader trend in France.

Yannick Masmondet, archi­tect of the Oil’ive Green project, plans to plant 50,000 hectares of olive trees in the South of France by 2030. 

The for­mer wine­maker from Bordeaux believes that plant­ing olive trees will diver­sify farm­ers’ incomes as cli­mate change impacts the via­bil­ity of grapes and other crops. 

Additionally, he and Lasserre iden­ti­fied olive oil as a strate­gic prod­uct, given the immense dif­fer­ence in pro­duc­tion and con­sump­tion. France pro­duces about four per­cent of the olive oil con­sumed in the coun­try, which has not changed much in the last 20 years.

• Sudouest