So, will it be Crouch End Olive Oil next?

Stroud Green Olive Oil - that raises a few eyebrows. 

The commonest question from wags seeing a bottle for the first time is 'Where's the olive grove?  I didn't know they grew olives in Stroud Green!' (For anyone outside the area, Stroud Green - despite its countrified name - is a fairly gritty, but vibrant, friendly and popular, inner city North London suburb.)

There has recently been some discussion on the area's Stroud Green.Org community Internet site about why the name is 'Stroud Green Olive Oil' at all.  Why not change the name from 'Stroud Green' to 'Crouch End' olive oil, or something altogether more generic and less local, in order to widen its appeal.

Here are my thoughts:

(Already posted to www.stroudgreen.org.)

On the question of the name, yes, I did play around with different ideas. I considered Crouch End Olive Oil, and why not also Muswell Hill Olive Oil, Stoke Newington Olive Oil, Finchley Olive Oil?

As it happens, I've have a top class advisor on this - someone in the branding/labelling business who is actually a professional label designer for the likes of Heinz etc - and who is also very generous with his time.  He designed and drew up the artwork for my label, all absolutely free.   So I have thousands of pounds worth of goodwill alone on the label.   (And he is a Stroud Greener to boot - at least until recently - and was a regular contributor under a pseudonym to stroudgreen.org, though he's now moved out of the area.)

He has advised against 'Crouch End Olive Oil' and the other variants. Why?

I would have to seek clarification from him for the exact argument, but my recollection is that from a branding perspective 'Stroud Green Olive Oil' works, on several levels - it's a bit of a joke, it's improbable, the name is 'green', it's inner-city but not a well-known or pretentious place (like Hampstead), it's an area with loyal fans and known to the cognoscenti, there's potentially an (admittedly small) core local following, with capacity to expand if the 'brand' ever became successful.

Very importantly, it is NOT generic Italian 'Tuscan Olive Oil' with a fake Italian name and a picture of olive trees, blue skies, peasants and Italian flags.  On all these counts it scores high on the 'Eh?' factor, and comes across as distinctive, different and, in fact, authentic.....   Which of course it is.

I did lobby for Crouch End Olive Oil as an additional selling point but my friend advised against it because it would dilute the brand.    

Two other factors - I personally have no connection with Crouch End, so to use that name would be slightly misleading and rather lame.  Stroud Green is a completely separate place, though only just over the hill.  And another thing: it's my personal view that people in Crouch End are less likely to see the joke implicit in the name if it were to be other than 'Stroud Green Olive Oil'.   'Crouch End Olive Oil'?   Yeah!   Crouch End is exactly the kind of upper middle class place you would EXPECT to have extra virgin olive oil by the gallon in the kitchens and an olive oil named after it - there's no double take.   People would just see it as an attempt to exploit the name.    Which it would be.

In fact my whole point in the oil and this blog is to drive home the notion that (as in the Mediterranean) good quality olive oil is everybody's right, not something exclusive but a healthy, natural food for everybody.   EXTRA VIRGIN OLIVE OIL FOR THE MASSES - that's what I say!

Another commentator observed that if I called it 'Crouch End Olive Oil' and got it stocked in the right Crouch End shops, 'watch the tweets, blogs, radio play ('Crouch Enders') and Guardian feature flood in....'

Well, I do have an interview and picture story lined up with the Ham and High in a couple of weeks' time, and surely the tweets, blogs, the Guardian food pages, Olive Magazine, Jamie Oliver and the soap opera can only follow.......

What do you think?   SGOO or CEOO?   Which scores highest?   Let me have your opinion.

Should we have an oil tasting bar in London?

Here's a conundrum. London (UK) is today Earth's greatest food-loving city - a capital of world cuisine, a rich mulligan of the very highest quality international tuck.

So search the Internet for 'olive oil tasting bars in London', and what do you find?

Yes, it's a an olive oil tasting bar in London all right, and a very nice one too.  That's London, Ontario.

Ontario, Canada.  The Pristine Olive Tasting Bar at 462 Cheapside Street is that city's "first tasting bar to specialize in real, fresh, certified Ultra Premium extra virgin olive oils" and stocks 24 different olive oils from around the world for customers to taste.  Find one you like and it can be poured into a flask and yours for up to $42 (£25) a litre.

But not a single olive oil tasting bar in London, England.

Over in north America, they're all at it. Today there are at least nine 'premium'-type olive oil and balsamic vinegar tasting bars in Canadian cities. Most have opened within the last two years. Each bar has its own take on the perceived luxury and trendiness of extra virgin olive oil: The Olive Oil Emporium, Liquid Gold, Dana Shortt Gourmet, Pristine, the Unrefined Olive, Emulsify, Frescolio, Olive-me, Olive That!

In the United States - I haven't tried to count them - there must be hundreds of olive oil and vinegar tasting bars too (here's a partial list from The Olive Source).  All driven by extra virgin oil's perceived desirability, entrepreneurial flair, and the services of a couple of smart olive oil importing companies.

But very few in Europe. And not one anywhere in the UK, as far as I can tell (with the exception, perhaps, of some oil behind the bar at a Somerset pub).

So why haven't Londoners in Britain taken to olive oil tasting bars?

The answer, in my opinion, is that we are much too sensible.

Yes, on the face of it getting people to taste and appreciate real extra virgin olive oil has to be a Good Thing.  But several things need to be said about these tasting bars.  Real extra virgin olive oil is much too important to leave to the trendy olive oil barristas.

First - in my opinion, they make extra virgin olive oil appear far too exclusive and uber-trendy, the expensive preserve of the rich and spoiled. This is Ultra Premium Extra Virgin Olive Oil with Capital Letters.

It's true that a very few top quality extra virgin oils are, like some wines, so rare and delicious as to be sought after at almost any price. But in the real world, genuine extra virgin olive oil is something that has been part of everyday life for millions of farmers, smallholders and working class folk throughout the world - and should continue to be.   In fact, in places like Italy and the South of France, it is.  The difference nowadays is that almost all the 'olive oil' commonly available to us northern food-lovers through our supermarket economy is not the real thing at all.

Every Italian family has a few olive trees somewhere, and a nonna who's done the harvest ever since she was knee-high to a sickle.  It's normal.   Extra virgin olive oil is normal too, and you shouldn't have to go to a slick Californian-style oil tasting bar to experience it.

Second - at some tasting bars, it's said, you can't even be absolutely certain the premium oil you've bought at a premium price really is the genuine stuff. Sure, they say it is.  They provide labels that look like scientidfic text books.  But if you look at this thread on the Truth In Olive Oil blog, there seems good reason to believe some of it may not be what it is claimed.

And third - it looks depressingly like a fad.   Fads are dangerous. When the Ultra Premium Extra Virgin Olive Oil bubble bursts in a year or two, and all the tasting bars are charity shops again, the olive oil business will be back as it was - only worse. Unrealistic expectations will have been created, then dashed.

Much better to work for a world where you can simply turn up at your local supermarket and buy a litre of extra virgin oil confident that you know what you're getting, and at a price somewhat less than an olive tycoon's ransom.  Not mixed, not blended, not refined, not chemical, just oil from a farmer's olive patch.  Too much to ask?  I don't think so.   That's what this blog is all about.

Make sure you do have a real Extra Virgin season.

Posters going up!

Posters for the Extra Virginity oil tasting in November going up at Il Piccolo Diavolo tonight!

Announcement - now free delivery to most North London postcodes

Following requests, FREE DELIVERY of Stroud Green Olive Oil is now extended to most London N postcodes around Stroud Green!

N1, N2, N4, N5, N6, N7, N8, N10, N15, N16, N17, N19, N22

Deliveries will start after the oil arrives in late November and free deliveries to these areas will last at least up until Christmas on any orders received by then (and not just on pre-orders).   The oil will be delivered from November 25th.

Pre-order Stroud Green Olive Oil by November 15th at a discount

You can also book here for 'Extra Virginity - an olive oil tasting night' at il Piccolo Diavolo on November 25th.   Places are limited.   Only £25 for bookings made by Nov 18th.

Have an Extra Virgin season!

An excellent book on Extra Virgin olive oil

As we greedily await that first trickle of glistening extra virgin oil from Abruzzo in around a month's time, I'm getting into the mood by revisiting some books and articles.

At the top of my list is a thoroughly good read, journalist Tom Mueller's Extra Virginity: the Sublime and Scandalous World of Olive Oil.

 

Mr Mueller is an American investigative journalist who has made it his business to - so to speak - immerse himself in extra virgin oil.    I tip my hat to him.   As a journalist myself with occasional pretensions to investigative work, this is a book I would like to have written.   I owe him for a lot more than my blog title.   

Here is a short volume that explores the olive oil business from its most fragrant and appealing heights to the murkiest depths.  It's a companion, a trove of information, and a muse for the oil-inspired. 

Mueller starts his book in an oil-tasting laboratory in Milan.    He's in the company of a man named Flavio Zaramella, a 66-year-old Italian businessman, a professional olive oil taster.  (Yes, there are such people - they are called sommeliers, like wine experts.)   

Zamarella and his expert companions are sitting in separate cubicles, waiting for oil samples in tulip-shaped glasses dunked in a thermostatically-controlled yoghurt-maker to reach a prescribed temperature of precisely 28 degrees C.   If that seems a touch odd, wait for what happens next.  Yes, the sommeliers taste the oil - it's how they do it that gets you sitting up.  The eight tasters sniff and taste each of the six samples in turn using a technique apparently known as stripaggio.

This, says Mr Mueller, is a special gurgling inhalation of oil and air, a kind of 'volcanic slurp' that coats the taste buds and wafts the oil's aroma into the nasal passages.... "They took a mouthful of oil. And then, as if they'd all been stricken by an oil-induced seizure, they began sucking in air violently at the corners of their mouths...."

I've tried this, and it's not something I really recommend.   Especially in polite company.  But it does rather make the point on which the whole romance of real extra-virgin olive oil depends - it's a magical substance which has to look, smell, feel and taste right.  Just like wine.  Stripaggio-ing away, the tasters are grading each oil for its flavour, aroma, intensity and texture, and looking out for imperfections like 'rancid', 'fusty', 'vinegary', 'muddy' or 'metallic'.

"Oil talk sounds like effete nonsense, until you actually put a good oil in your mouth," the delightful-sounding Zaramella tells Mueller - who then has a go himself and rather gilds the lily here by reporting that "tasting these oils was like strolling through a botanic garden, touring a perfume factory, and taking a long drive through spring meadows with the windows down, all at the same time."

Forget volcanic slurping.  You don't need to bother with a temperature-controlled yoghurt-maker and a tulip-shaped glass, or to master the doubtful art of the stripaggio, to distinguish real extra-virgin olive oil from a poor imitation.   Next time you buy a bottle of oil, just sniff and then taste it - really taste it.   No ciabatta, no dipping, just a little oil.   Half a teaspoonful will do the trick.  Does it have a pleasantly herby, fresh flavour, or does it taste like sump oil?   Does it make you cough (good) - or gag (bad)?   More on that later.

Anyway, that's the taste test at the heart of the 'sublime and scandalous' olive oil business Mr Mueller's fine book goes on to analyse, investigate and expose, and the matter this blog will explore between now and ev-day (extra-virgin day).   (If you are in the N4 area, we'll be having a tasting on November 25th.)

It's certainly the flavour of botanic garden, perfume factory and spring meadows that we'll be hoping for when we catch the first mugful of new oil from the Abruzzo mill in the middle of next month

Here's looking forward to an Extra Virgin season.

Counting down the days........

It's begun - the Italian olive oil harvest!

And this how it looks when the first gush flows out of the olive mill. [Picture from www.lucciola.me]  Doesn't it just get the juices flowing?  Now we're counting down the days until we start picking our own!

We know the harvest is under way because the first Facebook messages started arriving this morning, bearing images like the one above, of the magical green liquid just off the trees.  This one was posted by my Abruzzo friend Sammy. 

                                     

The new oil is, she observed, 'Soooooo good you almost wanted to dive into it.'    It may look radioactive, but it really is that green when it's top quality oil freshly pressed and from an ancient olive grove in a DOP area - nothing added and nothing taken away.

Olive plants are wondrous trees.  They fruit late in the year.  In mountainous Abruzzo, where our oil comes from, very late indeed - the picking usually starts at the end of October and can go on into late November or even early December.    Most of the olive trees in Abruzzo grow high up, sometimes well above 600m, where the fruit is late to mature and ripen.    We'll pick ours in mid-November..

Sadly, we don't live in Italy all year round but every autumn we recognise the more traditional signs that the olive-picking season has begun.   The little three-wheeler trucks called apes parked in the lane loaded with empty crates. The shouts and calls from under the trees.  People gathered in small family groups with boxes and packed lunches, laying out nets.  Somebody glimpsed balanced up a ladder.

So another olive oil harvest - la raccolta - has begun, the latest in a tradition going back four thousand years.  Hooray!  In this blog, I'll take my readers through the final few weeks of our own Abruzzo olive oil's progress from tree to olive mill and fustino (steel barrel), and its journey onward from the mountains of east central Italy to London.  Can't wait to get started.

Do join me in our Extra Virgin season!   And please leave a comment - I want to read your thoughts.

Welcome to Stroud Green Olive Oil

It's back!  By popular demand, new season Stroud Green Olive Oil will arrive in N4 on November 25th..
    

   

Weather permitting, we'll harvest the trees at Casa della Meridiana in mid-November and bring the extra-virgin fresh-pressed oil back to London right away.  To meet the demand we'll be bringing in more of the green nectar from our next door neighbours too.  Pre-order extra virgin oil at a discount by November 15th, with free local delivery.   And this year you can soon you can follow the progress of this year's harvest on the Extra Virginity Blog!.

  ORDER HERE

Have an Extra Virgin season!

Thanks!   Krappyrubsnif (aka Mike Durham)