Book Lays Out Best Practices for Olive Oil Production in Greece

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In the pub­lish­ing annals of the Greek olive oil sec­tor, Vasilios Frantzolas’s new book is prob­a­bly the first to thor­oughly present the com­plete steps to achieve qual­ity in olive oil pro­duc­tion from the field to bot­tle.

Modern Olive Oil Growing Techniques and Quality Olive Oil Production is Frantzolas’s third book in the field of olive oil mak­ing, filled with use­ful infor­ma­tion for olive tree grow­ers, pro­duc­ers, millers and bot­tlers.

“In this book, I present the most recent knowl­edge and the most mod­ern tech­niques of har­vest­ing and pro­cess­ing olives, based on my research and work as a tutor in sem­i­nars for over 18 years,” Frantzolas told Olive Oil Times.

An expert olive oil taster and qual­ity con­sul­tant, Frantzolas inher­ited his love for olive and olive oil along with the fam­ily olive groves in the Peloponnese.

His father and men­tor, Tasos, intro­duced him to the world of qual­ity olive oil, being the first in Greece to pack­age extra vir­gin olive oil in plas­tic bot­tles back in 1969.

“My father was a resource­ful man,” Frantzolas said. ​“He had patented a sys­tem he had devised for safely fill­ing and cap­ping the bot­tles of olive oil. I remem­ber myself as a kid fill­ing up bot­tles in our base­ment and then run­ning to the mar­ket to sell them.”

A career shift from civil engi­neer­ing was immi­nent for Frantzolas, who soon decided to turn his pas­sion into a pro­fes­sion; he expanded his stud­ies to food pol­icy and indulged him­self in explor­ing the ins and outs of mak­ing olive oil.

Over the years, through learn­ing, exper­i­ment­ing and work­ing together with other indus­try pro­fes­sion­als, Frantzolas has accu­mu­lated a large amount of knowl­edge cov­er­ing the full spec­trum of olive oil pro­duc­tion. He then started to con­vey his mas­tery of craft­ing qual­ity olive oil to olive grow­ers and pro­duc­ers by orga­niz­ing and teach­ing sem­i­nars.

At the same time, he has man­aged to stay close to the most recent devel­op­ments in the field by set­ting up col­lab­o­ra­tion chan­nels with uni­ver­sity pro­fes­sors across Europe and keep­ing track of aca­d­e­mic papers and other pub­li­ca­tions in the field of olive oil.

“A large part of the infor­ma­tion included in the book is the result of my edu­ca­tional trips abroad to var­i­ous uni­ver­si­ties, like those of Pisa and Perugia in Italy and the Institute for Food and Agricultural Research and Technology in Catalonia,” Frantzolas said.

His lat­est piece of writ­ing also con­tains details rarely found in the rel­e­vant lit­er­a­ture in Greece, such as defin­ing the cor­rect time in the sea­son for pick­ing olives, explain­ing olive oil fil­ter­ing, and describ­ing the avail­able solu­tions for stor­ing olive oil after milling.

“I also wanted to pro­vide prac­ti­cal advice to grow­ers, pro­duc­ers and millers on var­i­ous impor­tant mat­ters, like the advan­tages and dis­ad­van­tages of water­ing the olive trees or how to treat emul­sions dur­ing olives pro­cess­ing,” the author said.

The book starts in the olive grove, high­light­ing the impor­tance of the organic mat­ter con­tained in the soil to the pro­duc­tiv­ity of the olive trees.

Frantzolas also sug­gests that the soil ben­e­fits from avoid­ing fre­quent har­row­ing and by let­ting nature take over to allow other small plants and grass to grow. This way, ero­sion is avoided and the rain­wa­ter bet­ter pen­e­trates and remains in the soil.

An impor­tant aspect of mod­ern olive tree grow­ing is fer­til­iza­tion. While fer­til­iz­ers sig­nif­i­cantly con­tribute to the increased pro­duc­tiv­ity of the olive trees, it is essen­tial to use them in mod­er­a­tion and after exam­in­ing the nutri­tional require­ments of the trees.

“A sit­u­a­tion encoun­tered in many olive groves is over-fer­til­iza­tion using nitroge­nous fer­til­iz­ers,” Frantzolas said. ​“This prac­tice can lead to reduced fruition of the trees and also have a neg­a­tive impact on the phe­nols con­tained in the pro­duced olive oil.”

Frantzolas also main­tains in his book that when non-irri­gated olive groves are con­verted to irri­gated, the gain for pro­duc­ers is sig­nif­i­cant with an increase between 60 per­cent and 300 per­cent in the quan­tity of the olive oil pro­duced.

He also points out that a largely unknown ben­e­fit of mod­er­ate irri­ga­tion is the improve­ment of the olive oil’s sen­sory pro­file.

“Irrigation favors the blos­som­ing of the olive trees and increases the num­ber of dru­pes and the quan­tity of the oil they con­tain,” he said. ​“But maybe the least known advan­tage of irri­ga­tion is that it increases the aro­mas of the olive oil.”

“However, improv­i­dent use of irri­ga­tion water will ulti­mately reduce the bit­ter­ness and pun­gency of the oil since it low­ers the quan­tity of phe­no­lic com­pounds,” he added. ​“This must be care­fully con­sid­ered with rel­a­tively low-phe­no­lic vari­eties like Arbequina.”

Besides lay­ing out the proper meth­ods of olive grow­ing, har­vest­ing and milling, the author went the extra mile to clear up false per­cep­tions that are still preva­lent through­out the sec­tor in Greece.

In his book, he strongly crit­i­cizes the char­ac­ter­is­tic Greek phe­nom­e­non of prun­ing the olive trees dur­ing har­vest, which ulti­mately leads to a sub­stan­tial loss of the pro­duc­ers’ income.

“It is a false prac­tice fol­lowed by pro­duc­ers in many ter­ri­to­ries of Greece,” Frantzolas said. ​“Pruning is applied amid har­vest to pick the olives from the cut­off branches and reduce the work­load. However, no real rules of prop­erly treat­ing the trees apply in this case and con­se­quently, the trees lose a cru­cial part of their body and foliage and fail to pro­duce enough olive fruits the next sea­son.”

He also advises that, with most olive vari­eties, the best time to pick the olive fruits is when their color has become yel­low to green rather than pur­ple to black. At that stage, no more oil con­cen­trates in the dru­pes and the olives are more exposed to the fruit fly and other pathogens if left unpicked.

A large part of the book is devoted to the milling of olives, describ­ing all the mod­ern-day equip­ment used and the meth­ods applic­a­ble to the extrac­tion of olive oil.

The infor­ma­tion is pre­sented in a lin­ear man­ner and in accor­dance with the dif­fer­ent stages of olives pro­cess­ing in every mod­ern olive oil mill, begin­ning with the leaf removal and the wash­ing of the olives and end­ing with the fil­ter­ing of the olive oil which takes place at the end of the extrac­tion process.

“Master millers will find every answer they seek about olive pro­cess­ing in this chap­ter, being able to increase the quan­tity and most impor­tantly the sought-after qual­ity that makes the dif­fer­ence in today’s olive oil world,” Frantzolas said.

In advance, the author presents new devel­op­ments in the extrac­tion process of olive oil, such as the rapid warm­ing and cool­ing treat­ment of the olive paste before enter­ing the knead­ing trough, which reduces the required time for malax­a­tion and improves the organolep­tic char­ac­ter­is­tics of the olive oil.

Frantzolas explained that the tech­nique could prove use­ful in areas where higher than usual tem­per­a­tures are expected to be the norm in the com­ing years due to cli­mate change, includ­ing Crete and the south­ern Peloponnese.

The olive dru­pes are already at a high tem­per­a­ture at the time of har­vest as a result of warm weather, so the rapid cool­ing of the olive paste before malax­a­tion coun­ter­acts the abnor­mal increase of the dru­pes’ tem­per­a­ture lead­ing to an olive oil of higher qual­ity.

No mat­ter the devel­op­ments and solu­tions the advance­ment of tech­nol­ogy offers, the author insists that progress in the sec­tor can­not be obtained with­out proper train­ing and in-depth famil­iar­ity with the require­ments of olive oil mak­ing.

“The book is devoted to the olive grow­ers, pro­duc­ers and millers of Greece, with the expec­ta­tion to be read and the knowl­edge to be dis­sem­i­nated,” Frantzolas wrote in the book’s pref­ace.

“We need to apply new prac­tices in order to become more ratio­nal at fer­til­iz­ing, water­ing and prun­ing the olive trees, and to opti­mize the pro­cess­ing of olives,” he added. Only by improv­ing our knowl­edge and our meth­ods in all the stages of olive oil pro­duc­tion, we will be able to increase the out­put capac­ity of our olive groves and also ele­vate the qual­ity of our olive oils.”