`Two More Greek Regions Apply for Olive Oil PDOs - Olive Oil Times

Two More Greek Regions Apply for Olive Oil PDOs

By Costas Vasilopoulos
Oct. 6, 2012 09:19 UTC


The three legs” of the Chalkidiki penin­sula extend into the north­ern Aegean Sea.

Two more regions of Greece, Messinia and Chalkidiki, have sub­mit­ted appli­ca­tions to the European Commission for a Protected Designation of Origin’ (PDO) label for their extra vir­gin olive oil.

Messinia in south­ern Greece, aims at putting all the olive oil it pro­duces under the PDO umbrella with the Kalamata’ tag, while Chalkidiki, near Salonika, wants to secure a spe­cial type of oil pro­duced when the olives are still green and not fully ripe called Agoureleo Chalkidikis.’

A PDO is a des­ig­na­tion which acknowl­edges that an agri­cul­tural prod­uct or food orig­i­nat­ing from a spe­cific area or loca­tion bears char­ac­ter­is­tics almost exclu­sively attrib­uted to the place of its ori­gin, and more specif­i­cally to the envi­ron­men­tal con­di­tions, the micro­cli­mate and the human fac­tors. Another prepo­si­tion is that the prod­uct is pro­duced or made within the geo­graph­i­cal lim­its of the area.
Both regions had to include in their appli­ca­tions the spe­cial char­ac­ter­is­tics of their olive oil, such as color, aroma, taste, acid­ity, oleic acid, the olive dru­pes vari­ety and also the pro­cess­ing meth­ods in great detail.

A PDO process is not an easy task to com­plete; a vari­ety of facts and fig­ures must be col­lected to prove that the prod­uct under exam­i­na­tion dif­fer­en­ti­ates from other sim­i­lar prod­ucts from other areas and char­ac­ter­izes the place it orig­i­nates from. Then the appli­ca­tion is pub­lished in the Official Journal of the European Union and, if no objec­tions occur within six months, the PDO name tag is reg­is­tered for exclu­sive usage.

The aim is to pro­tect and pro­mote high qual­ity prod­ucts and at the same time sig­nal that these prod­ucts are worth con­sumers’ money. So far, accord­ing to the Ministry of Agriculture, 16 areas of Greece have been awarded a PDO label for their olive oil.


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