`Meet the Genoese Couple Cultivating Traditional Italian Olives in Uruguay - Olive Oil Times
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Meet the Genoese Couple Cultivating Traditional Italian Olives in Uruguay

By Daniel Dawson
Feb. 12, 2025 15:21 UTC
Summary Summary

Maria Vittoria Saccarello and Domenico Bruzzone decided to start an olive grow­ing project in Uruguay after retir­ing from their human­i­tar­ian work world­wide. Despite fac­ing chal­lenges like weather set­backs and labor short­ages, their com­pany, Pique Roto, has seen suc­cess pro­duc­ing high-qual­ity olive oils and table olives, and they plan to expand into oleo­tourism to edu­cate con­sumers about their prod­ucts.

After more than four decades of trav­el­ing the world and work­ing on human­i­tar­ian aid and devel­op­ment projects, Maria Vittoria Saccarello and Domenico Bruzzone wanted to pur­sue a new project after retire­ment.

Instead of return­ing to their native Genoa from their last post in West Africa (after Vienna, Central America, West Africa, Bolivia and Pakistan), they began search­ing for a place to set­tle in Latin America, with an oper­a­tional agenda.

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“Our first assign­ment out­side of Europe was on the Mexican bor­der with Guatemala,” Bruzzone said. ​“Latin America made a last­ing impres­sion on us.”

At the same time, the cou­ple became pas­sion­ate about olive grow­ing par­tially due to their upbring­ing in north­ern Italy and their expe­ri­ences work­ing with the Italian gov­ern­ment to plant olive trees in Egypt, Lebanon and Pakistan.

Domenico Bruzzone (third from right) and Saccarello (second from left) planting olive trees at the experimental Bari Chacwal station in Pakistan in 2014. (Photo: Pique Roto)

Eventually, the cou­ple iden­ti­fied Uruguay as a suit­able loca­tion for their new project, cit­ing the dol­lar­ized econ­omy, polit­i­cal sta­bil­ity, lan­guage, cul­tural sim­i­lar­i­ties to Italy and olive-friendly ter­roir.

“We did some research about the nec­es­sary size for the com­pany to become eco­nom­i­cally self-sus­tain­ing and make the invest­ment prof­itable,” Saccarello said.

The cou­ple even­tu­ally bought a 40-hectare plot of land in the cen­tral depart­ment of Florida, 100 kilo­me­ters north­east of Montevideo, Uruguay’s cap­i­tal, in 2012. They planted their first olive trees in 2014 and pro­duced olive oil for the first time in 2019.

Pique Roto started planting 30 hectares of olive trees in 2012. (Photo: Pique Roto)

While Arbequina, Picual and Coratina are the dom­i­nant vari­eties in Uruguay, Saccarello and Bruzzone opted to import tra­di­tional Italian vari­eties, includ­ing Taggiasca, Frantoio, Leccino and Pendolino, from a well-known Italian nurs­ery.

“When we first planted, nobody knew Taggiasca, Frantoio, Leccino and Pendolino in Uruguay,” Saccarello said. ​“So the agron­o­mist asked us to plant Arbequina to com­pare its yields with the Italian vari­eties.”

After sev­eral set­backs, includ­ing half of the Arbequina trees dying in the first year after their roots failed to take hold, and a tor­nado which knocked-out some 500 trees in the grove, inspir­ing the brand name, Pique Roto, or bro­ken stick, the cou­ple dis­cov­ered that the Italian vari­eties thrived in Uruguay, espe­cially Taggiasca and Pendolino.

Saccarello inspects the groves ahead of the harvest, which typically begins in late March and ends in mid-June. (Photo: Pique Roto)

“The north­ern Italian vari­eties have a greater affin­ity than the Spanish vari­eties [Arbequina and Picual] because [Florida] has a rainier, almost cold cli­mate,” Bruzzone said.

Combining con­ven­tional vari­eties and Italian imports also resulted in a stag­gered har­vest.

“It starts in late March or early April with Arbequina, then it goes to Leccino, depend­ing on the speed of the olive’s ripen­ing cycle, con­tin­ues with Frantoio and ends with Taggiasca in mid-June,” Bruzzone said. ​“This allows the har­vest to be pro­grammed and is har­mo­nized if there is no excess rain.”

Saccarello added that other pro­duc­ers usu­ally har­vest every­thing early to avoid the win­ter humid­ity and increased poten­tial for the olives to develop anthrac­nose, result­ing in defects in the oil.

Even though one-fifth of their trees are Arbequina, Bruzzone and Saccarello focus mainly on the Italian vari­eties, and were ini­tially sell­ing Arbequina extra vir­gin olive oil in bulk. ​“With the sale of Arbequina, we gen­er­ally finance the entire har­vest,” Bruzzone said.

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The cou­ple pro­duces two extra vir­gin olive oils: Tosca, a Tuscan field blend of Frantoio, Leccino and Pendolino, and a Taggiasca mono­va­ri­etal.

“We do not make Tosca in the mill. In one year, Tosca might have more Frantoio, mak­ing it more fruity and green, spicier and more bit­ter,” Saccarello said. ​“Another year, it might have more Leccino, pro­vid­ing an inter­est­ing sweet note. Tosca is a prod­uct of what the land gives us.”

On the other hand, the Taggiasca mono­va­ri­etal is a unique late-sea­son olive oil and yielded one of four first-place awards at the 2024 Mario Solinas Awards, hosted in Uruguay.

Saccarello and her agronomist (left) inspect the olive groves with a delegation from the International Olive Council and Uruguayan Olive Association (Asolur). (Photo: Pique Roto)

“Obviously, this moti­vates us a lot,” Bruzzone said. ​“It is recog­ni­tion for ten years of hard work.”

He added that the award was espe­cially grat­i­fy­ing after the cloudy and rainy 2024 har­vest, which made pick­ing the olives and other tastes in the groves very intense.

“The amount of rain was tremen­dous; it hardly stopped,” Bruzzone said. ​“We also wor­ried about the qual­ity of the oil since the olives had so lit­tle sun­light expo­sure lead­ing up to pick­ing.”

In the mill, Saccarello said she had to reg­u­late the cal­i­bra­tion of the decanter, the malax­ing speed and the times every day due to the amount of water in the olives to pre­vent the paste from becom­ing a watery emul­sion.

Despite these chal­lenges, Pique Roto har­vested 193 met­ric tons of olives, sig­nif­i­cantly higher than the 53 tons har­vested in 2023 dur­ing Uruguay’s his­toric drought.

Overall, pre­lim­i­nary har­vest data from the pri­vate sec­tor shows Uruguay pro­duced 614 tons of olive oil in 2024, with Pique Roto as one of the few com­pa­nies that saw pro­duc­tion increase com­pared to 2023.

While the rain was the com­pa­ny’s main chal­lenge in 2024, find­ing enough work­ers to under­take a man­ual har­vest and work in the mill is always chal­leng­ing.

Despite labor chal­lenges, Saccarello said she prefers a man­ual har­vest to a mechan­i­cal one since it allows her to con­trol the amount of fruit brought to the mill.

Saccarello mills less than five tons of olives dily, allowing her to ensure high quality. (Photo: Pique Roto)

The com­pany has Mori-Tem equip­ment capa­ble of pro­cess­ing 500 kilo­grams per hour.

“The goal is to mill no more than five tons of olives each day because this amount allows us to have the max­i­mum pos­si­ble qual­ity con­trol,” she said.

Looking ahead to the 2025 har­vest, Bruzzone and Saccarello antic­i­pate a rea­son­ably good har­vest, esti­mat­ing it will be between 150 and 170 tons of olives.

“There are plants loaded with fruit and plants that have noth­ing at all,” Saccarello said. ​“Anyway, we will see how the growth of the olives con­tin­ues.”

Bruzzone and Saccarello said the com­pany plans to intro­duce a Pendolino mono­va­ri­etal brand after intro­duc­ing their lat­est biva­ri­etal, Sur, a blend of Arbequina and Coratina, the lat­ter of which is com­mon in Uruguay.

While most Uruguayan olive groves are located near the coast, the inland climate of Florida favors northern Italain varieties more adapted to the cold. (Photo: Pique Roto)

“We want to exper­i­ment with a Pendolino mono­var­ial, which is some­what rare in Italy, too,” Saccarello said.

“Pendolino is a very inter­est­ing tree that our agron­o­mist is con­vinced should be expanded,” Bruzzone added. ​“It is a very strong oil, and the plant is majes­tic.”

Depending on how the oil turns out and the mar­ket reac­tion, the cou­ple will decide whether to keep a sig­nif­i­cant amount of the batch or blend it into a tank with Tosca.

While olive oil pro­duc­tion is their pas­sion, Saccarello said the company’s key to suc­cess is intro­duc­ing a range of prod­ucts to the mar­ket, fur­ther devel­op­ing those that show more appeal and dou­bling down on the ones that do.

The founders of Pique Roto believe producers must offer a range of olive products in the market. (Photo: Pique Roto)

“This is a very impor­tant eco­nomic com­ple­ment for the plan­ta­tion,” Bruzzone said.

Along with olive oil, the cou­ple pro­duces table olives in a brine with a tra­di­tional nine month treat­ment. Most table olives in Uruguay are imported from Argentina and treated with lye, result­ing in a markedly dif­fer­ent fla­vor pro­file.

“Almost all the olive’s nutri­tional ele­ments, its organolep­tic prop­er­ties and pro­bi­otics are almost all lost [when treated in lye],” Bruzzone said.

Saccarello, who loves to cook in her free time, said the com­pany also sells a range of olive pâté con­cocted in her lab­o­ra­tory over­look­ing the olive trees.

“When we first started with the table olives, I noticed that there was no olive pâté in the mar­ket,” she said. ​“So I started mak­ing a line of prod­ucts called ​‘regional pas­sions’ which are based on tra­di­tional recipes of the Mediterranean diet from the dif­fer­ent regions of Italy.”

“We are cur­rently work­ing on two prod­ucts before intro­duc­ing them to the mar­ket,” she said. ​“Sometimes, they don’t imme­di­ately catch on, but most of the time, they do work out.”

Another aspect of the Uruguayan olive sec­tor Pique Roto is work­ing to enter is oleo­tourism.

Bruzzone believes that the best place to explain the extraordinary qualities of extra virgin olive oil is in the grove. (Photo: Pique Roto)

Bruzzone said oleo­tourism pro­vides pro­duc­ers an excel­lent oppor­tu­nity to edu­cate con­sumers about extra vir­gin olive oil’s health ben­e­fits and sus­tain­abil­ity while devel­op­ing a will­ing­ness to pay.

“There is no bet­ter way to explain to the con­sumer about the mer­its of olive oil than a visit to a plan­ta­tion where they can under­stand what this tree is, how it devel­ops, how it is cared for and how much work that entails,” he said.

Since Pique Roto focuses its efforts on the domes­tic mar­ket — though the com­pany has exported Arbequina in bulk before — Saccarello empha­sized that it is nec­es­sary to bring Uruguayans to olive groves and explain the dif­fer­ence between local pro­duc­tion and imports from large-scale Spanish, Italian and Argentine pro­duc­ers and bot­tlers.

“You have to show the con­sumer the olive tree and say, ​‘see that tree, it is respon­si­ble for the three-liter bag-in-box you bought last week,’” she said, point­ing out that it is more dif­fi­cult to con­cep­tu­al­ize what ten kilo­grams of olives looks like com­pared to a liter of oil. ​“This helps them under­stand,” she said.

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