Kalinjot Monovarietal Places Albanian Olive Oil on World Stage

A record-break­ing har­vest has also yielded Albania’s first-ever award at the 2023 NYIOOC World Olive Oil Competition.

The Illyrian Press earned a Gold Award for an organic Kalinjot, an endemic olive vari­ety, at the world’s largest olive oil qual­ity com­pe­ti­tion and joined elite brands from 28 other coun­tries in the Official Guide to the World’s Best Olive Oils.

“First of all, it’s really excit­ing to win,” owner Andrew Strong told Olive Oil Times. ​“I think it’s gen­er­ally a pretty excit­ing time in Albania.”

Strong first vis­ited Albania in 2005 and was imme­di­ately impressed by the south­east­ern European country’s moun­tain­ous land­scape and cul­ture.

However, he said the infra­struc­ture was severely under­de­vel­oped. When he first vis­ited the coun­try, it would take him 15 hours to make the 100-kilo­me­ter jour­ney from Tirana, the national cap­i­tal, south to Vlorë, where his olive groves are located. ​“Now it’s a two or three-hour trip,” he said.

“It’s a region with tremen­dous poten­tial,” Strong added. ​“And it does­n’t sur­prise me that it can pro­duce some high-qual­ity olive oil.”

Shortly after his first visit, Strong met Vesaf and Bruno Musaj. The father-son team is now respon­si­ble for pro­duc­ing The Illyrian Press’s extra vir­gin olive oil.

“In 2006/07, I met Bruno and Vesaf, who had been pro­duc­ing olive oil at a very small scale,” he said. ​“I tasted their olive oil, and the qual­ity was such that I couldn’t walk away. I was com­pelled to start this project and bring the olive oil to the United States.”

By 2010, Strong started The Ilyrrian Press, named after the Indo-European-speak­ing peo­ple who lived in the region more than 2,000 years ago. His first har­vest took place in 2012.

Strong said the com­pany had faced plenty of chal­lenges in the decade since pro­duc­tion began. However, the unique fla­vors and high polyphe­nol con­tent of the​Kalinjot extra vir­gin olive oil con­vinced him that the time and effort would pay off.

Now, the com­pany imports olive oil to the U.S., sell­ing it mainly around East Hampton, New York. Strong said he entered the NYIOOC because he felt his team was ready.

Along with a bumper har­vest – which Ministry of Agriculture offi­cials esti­mate at a record-high 25,000 tons, more than dou­ble the aver­age of the pre­vi­ous five sea­sons – Bruno Masaj told Olive Oil Times through a trans­la­tor, Alban Rafuna, that qual­ity was also as high as ever.

“The pro­duc­tion qual­ity is approx­i­mately the same through­out all years,” he said. ​“One of the main dif­fer­ences is the time when it rains, and this year hap­pened to have the rain­fall at a specif­i­cally good time for the devel­op­ment of the olives.”

Strong added that the pro­duc­tion team had heard from local grow­ers from whom they buy olives that this year would be a good har­vest. ​“That cor­re­sponded with hav­ing bet­ter infra­struc­ture in place, and we thought this was the moment to enter the NYIOOC,” he said.

According to Masaj, Albania’s bumper har­vest can mainly be attrib­uted to young olive trees planted 15 years ago enter­ing matu­rity.

He added that olive cul­ti­va­tion in the coun­try swiftly expanded after the tran­si­tion from a sin­gle-party com­mu­nist state to a democ­racy 30 years ago. This was mainly due to agrar­ian reforms, which saw indi­vid­ual fam­i­lies receive plots of land and the free­dom to plant what they wished instead of what was man­dated by state-run coop­er­a­tives.

With a long his­tory of olive oil pro­duc­tion, moun­tain­ous ter­rain fea­tur­ing well-drained soil, hot and sunny sum­mers with low humid­ity and mild, wet win­ters, Albania is well-suited to olive cul­ti­va­tion which quickly expanded.

When Strong first began pro­duc­tion, he said the only viable busi­ness plan for the com­pany was to export to the United States.

“Once we put the money for­ward to get the qual­ity we were look­ing for, the price point [of sell­ing the olive oil domes­ti­cally] just did­n’t work,” he said.

However, Strong added that the trade infra­struc­ture between Albania and the United States was poorly devel­oped.

“The first year, we had to hire our own con­tainer for a very small quan­tity of olive oil because there was no con­tainer to share to bring it to the United States,” Strong said. ​“As we’ve scaled up, we’ve had to basi­cally develop that infra­struc­ture to move prod­uct from Albania to the United States.”

According to the Observatory for Economic Complexity, a data­base affil­i­ated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, total exports from Albania to the United States rose from $29.7 mil­lion in 2010 to $65.8 mil­lion in 2021.

While table olives have become the country’s third most sig­nif­i­cant agri­cul­tural export to the U.S. – val­ued at $233,000 in 2021 – olive oil exports are neg­li­gi­ble.

However, The Illyrian Press now has a well-estab­lished sup­ply chain. Strong said this process begins with local farm­ers who sell their olives to the com­pany, adding that a big part of the com­pa­ny’s suc­cess comes from cul­ti­vat­ing these strong rela­tion­ships.

With flow­er­ing yet to occur in Albania, Masaj said it is still too early to fore­cast how the 2023/24 crop year will unfold. Still, he is con­fi­dent that the com­ing har­vest will also be fruit­ful and said qual­ity will likely be as high as ever.

“Considering the his­tor­i­cal data that shows that the pro­duc­tion has been increas­ing at an increas­ing rate every year, this makes us feel and believe that it will be another good har­vest,” he said.

“Besides the quan­tity, we will con­cen­trate aggres­sively on hav­ing a qual­ity pro­duc­tion by pick­ing olives from old trees, choos­ing trees on ele­vated land and try­ing to pick the olives from the crown of the trees, which are more exposed to the sun,” Masaj con­cluded.

• OEC