`Italian Producers Lead the Way at Fourth EVO IOOC - Olive Oil Times
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Italian Producers Lead the Way at Fourth EVO IOOC

By Ylenia Granitto
Jun. 10, 2019 08:26 UTC

The fourth edi­tion of the EVO International Olive Oil Contest (EVO-IOOC) con­cluded with an award cer­e­mony held on June 1 in the City Council Hall of Palmi, a land­mark of the Violet Coast, in Calabria.

The resort, located in the south­ern end of the Tyrrhenian shore­line, was the beau­ti­ful back­drop to the com­pe­ti­tion that cel­e­brates some of the world’s best extra vir­gin olive oils and fla­vored olive oils.

It is a great sat­is­fac­tion to have obtained such recog­ni­tion after a com­pli­cated cam­paign. This award is the results of con­sid­er­able efforts by all of us.- Marcello Palumbo, of the Sololio coop­er­a­tive

“The EVO-IOOC 2019 has been a real chal­lenge, which was even­tu­ally won by pro­duc­ers deter­mined to achieve the high­est qual­ity in spite of every­thing,” Antonio G. Lauro, the pres­i­dent of com­pe­ti­tion and native of the Violet Coast, said. ​“An excel­lent qual­ity has com­pen­sated the decline in pro­duc­tion suf­fered by coun­tries like Italy, Greece, Turkey, Tunisia, and Brazil.”

Antonio G Lauro and Stefania Reggio award Tony Gualtieri of Oleavanti, Lebanon

Lauro added that it was ​“an extremely dif­fi­cult year, that put a strain on many farms, turned out to be excel­lent in terms of qual­ity, as shown by the prizes awarded in the com­pe­ti­tion.”

See Also:Fairs and Competitions

The final event of the con­test was opened by the gen­eral man­ager Stefania Reggio, who revealed the fig­ures of this edi­tion, which received 431 entries from 17 coun­tries. Italy won the most prizes with 121 medals, includ­ing three Best in Class awards, fol­lowed by Greece, with 50 medals and Spain, with 39. Portugal earned 20 medals, fol­lowed by Turkey, with 19, Argentina and Brazil, both won 12 and 11 medals, respec­tively.

Among the award-win­ning pro­duc­ers, Consuelo Garzo, who man­age the Dolciterre farm in Seminara, Calabria, with her sis­ters Alessia and Maria Rosa, pointed out that ​“these awards come at the end of a chal­leng­ing sea­son as a recog­ni­tion of a strong com­mit­ment.”

With their Ottobratica they earned the Gaetano Avallone spe­cial award for the Best Italian Monovarietal.

“Our olive grove is com­posed of 80 per­cent sec­u­lar plants of this autochtho­nous cul­ti­var,” she said, after receiv­ing the prize along with other recog­ni­tions for their ​‘Rosì’ and Olio di Calabria PGI.

“It is even more excit­ing to cel­e­brate the qual­ity of our extra vir­gin olive oils here in our land,” she added.

Overall, 259 mono­va­ri­etals in the com­pe­ti­tion accounted for 64 per­cent of sam­ples, rep­re­sent­ing 150 dif­fer­ent cul­ti­vars, while prod­ucts with des­ig­na­tions of geo­graph­i­cal ori­gin were 20 per­cent of entries.

The high qual­ity of the extra vir­gin olive oils required four days of intense work car­ried out by an inter­na­tional panel com­posed by Aida Lazzez (Tunisia), Birsen Can Pehlivan (Turkey), Ehud Soriano (Israel), Cristina Stribacu, Eleftheria Germanaki and Kostas Liris (Greece), Miciyo Yamada, Hiromi Nakamura and Nori Ogido (Japan), Na Xie (China), Javier Sànchez Pedròs, Juan Baseda Torruella and M Ángeles Calvo Fandos (Spain), Francisco Ataíde Pavão (Portugal), Carmelo Orlando, Roberto Marchesini, Rosario Franco and Indra Galbo (Italy).

“It is a great sat­is­fac­tion to have obtained such recog­ni­tion after a com­pli­cated cam­paign,” Marcello Palumbo, who is in charge of pro­duc­tion at the Sololio coop­er­a­tive in Ostuni, Puglia, said. ​“Our Delia Audace is a blend of Frantoio, Coratina, and Cassanese pro­duced from the olive trees man­aged by my wife, Mimma, and her sis­ters, Dina and Carmela Bruno.”

“This award is the results of con­sid­er­able efforts by all of us,” he added.

Gold Medals went also to the lemon and orange fla­vored olive oils pro­duced in Greece by Peter Liokareas.

“It was a great recog­ni­tion for our com­pany,” he said after receiv­ing awards includ­ing a Gold Medal and a Silver Medal for ​‘Wild,’ a blend of wild olives and Koroneiki and ​‘Early Harvest,’ a Koroneiki mono­va­ri­etal.

“I live in the U.S. and fre­quently travel to Greece to man­age our olive trees, which are taken care of by my fam­ily,” he added, intro­duc­ing his cousin Fotios, who had just arrived from Peloponnese. ​“This year the humid cli­mate favored out­break of pests such as the olive fruit fly and we lost part of pro­duc­tion, but we worked very hard to try to do the best with the fruits that we have saved and, these awards, received at the end of such a hard sea­son are even more spe­cial for us.”

The com­plete list of win­ners is avail­able on the com­pe­ti­tion web­site.

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