OIL FOR EAST COUNTY An Introduction to the East County Olive Oil Subculture
	MARCH 2005

by David Navarrette
Photos by Russell Byrne

I have a long-standing love of olives and the products that can be made from this wonderful fruit. I had a hobby for some time of getting ripe olives and curing them for our personal consumption.

I’m a real fan of olive oil. Olive-based products provide that happy combination of being both healthy and delicious. Olives are full of natural antioxidants, which is why olive oil is so good for you. Olives and olive oil are a healthy addition to anyone’s diet. Discerning cooks do a real favor for the people who eat the meals they prepare by regularly cooking with olive oil instead of the cheaper vegetable oil and oil substitutes available in grocery stores. Olives are good for the digestion, and provide less fattening ingredients in a balanced diet.

About seven years ago, I landed in the middle of the olive oil business with both feet. I became a professional in the olive oil industry with dizzying speed. It happened when Jack Roddy discovered that I had an interest in olives. He told me that I could have the olives from the trees on his ranch. “Just take them all,” he told me.

Pushed into the Olive Oil Business
Jack Roddy’s offer sounded like a good deal until I discovered that his Ranch had more than a hundred trees, which were generating a harvest far too large for us to simply cure. We were forced to find other uses for the olives, so we made a decision, almost on the spot, to go into the olive oil business. We hired a crew and went to work the very week we made the decision.

Desperation often provides good incentive for inspiration in getting things done. We were inspired to accomplish things in an almost miraculous timeframe. During the next ninety days we achieved what normally would have taken a business a couple of years to accomplish. By the end of the first three months we had harvested and pressed the olives, joined the COOC (California Olive Oil Council), gotten our product certified as extra virgin oil, designed and printed labels, bottled our product, and had forty cases of olive oil ready for market.

The business part all by itself — locating a press, finding a source for bottles, and designing and printing labels — would normally take a year. We did all that in less than a month. I accomplished all of that because I was a desperate and driven man. The possibility of permitting hundreds of thousands of olives to lie rotting on the ground after I had promised Jack Roddy to take care of them was a prospect that I simply could not possibly endure.

Over the intervening seven years since that first harvest our crop has increased ten-fold — from forty cases of olives to four hundred cases, which we anticipate will be the size of the 2004/2005 crop.

Shifting into High Gear
I pressed my first two crops in Richmond and then moved to The Olive Press in Glen Ellen, California. Our business was never able to really take off as long as we had to rely upon an outside service to do our pressing. Fortunately, we are on the verge of coming out from beneath that limitation.

The ag rules that were formerly imposed by the county prevented residents from pressing their own olives or grapes. Last April, however, the County Board of Supervisors amended the rules to allow us to press our own product. As a result, this year my business is reaching a new stage of maturity because I’ve ordered my own olive press, which will be shipped from Lucca providence of Italy and will be here in time for the next crop.

Five years ago I planted my own olive trees and am harvesting crop from other trees scattered around East County. I’ve been proactive with some of the people I’m working with. I’ve convinced some people with big yards to plant olive trees. This is usually a pretty easy sale because olive trees have easy maintenance requirements, are very hardy trees, and are very tolerant of drought.

We’re putting together a robust olive coop called “The Oils of Brentwood.” When I find people who want to join, I manage the trees for them and let them provide whatever sweat-equity they like on a sliding scale. The owners of the trees can do everything from sell us their olives to bottling their own crops. We work the coop business on Saturdays. People can belong to the coop who have no interest whatsoever in making money, but just like the idea of bottling olive oil from their own trees for their own use.

Someday soon we’ll have a Community Press Day. People will bring their olives in to add to the common press and receive back their share of the oil by weight.

The Inside Story of the Olive Harvest
Besides being good for the diet, an olive is the easiest of all vegetables to process. The same antioxidants that make these so healthy, also makes them easy to bottle. You can pick, crush, and bottle olives without any further processing being required.

Time is the big factor with an olive harvest, since olives begin to ferment as soon as they come off the tree. You have to crush them as soon as possible; the acid level begins to rise inexorably as they set around after picking. Because olives are so time-sensitive, I never pick them off the ground. A few hours off the tree can make a big difference in the quality of the product. The other thing about harvesting olives is the importance of maintaining purity. A cup of something a little off-flavor will affect the taste of an entire drum of product.

Our products have been certified as extra virgin every year that we’ve been in business. Some people wonder what “extra virgin” could possibly mean. The fact is, that it is a good quality to look for whenever anybody buys a bottle of olive oil. A batch of olive oil achieves the extra virgin rating when chemical tests verify that less than one percent of the oil is acid. The certification is also based upon a taste test, which consists of the same kind of blind test that is used to rate wine.

Based upon the chemical tests, together with the points the samples receive from the taste tests, a particular batch of olive oil is certified to be extra virgin, or not.

Training Users to Appreciate Excellence
Our industry is in an educational cycle — like the wine industry in the 60s. It didn’t happen by luck that people are willing to pay $150 for a bottle of wine. People developed palettes that were trained to detect and to appreciate the quality of the glass of wine they were drinking. In the same way, we are now trying to educate the olive-consuming public to appreciate quality in the olive oil they are tasting and using in their cooking and food preparation.

We’re also trying to eliminate misconceptions that have developed about olive oil. Some people, for example, believe that oil that isn’t green isn’t fresh. But that simply isn’t so. We conduct tastings to demonstrate to people the lack of connection between freshness and color. In fact, we learned that unscrupulous marketers have been adding leaves in their product. If you exhale this product from your nose you can actually smell the chlorophyll. People don’t learn to do that without some education, but it’s a fact.

Another area where we are trying to educate people is about fresh oil — meaning oil that has been recently pressed. We’re developing a market for olive oil that isn’t aged. New oil for the holiday, for example, is currently a big deal in Italy. When we get our press running we will give people the opportunity to taste oil that’s only a few minutes old. Fresh olive oil has a distinctive taste. It is different, but good.

People also need to be educated about storing olive oil. I’m not concerned about spending a lot of money on fancy bottles, since olive oil should not be stored on the windowsill. Heat and light are the enemies of olive oil. Any heat positively torments it. People sometimes buy olive oil in some fancy display-quality bottle. Then they let it sit in the sunshine of a windowsill sometimes for months or even for a couple of years. Finally, they open it and use it in food preparation only to discover that the oil has lost all of its quality. They think the oil tastes bad when the truth is that it has simply gone bad.

We sell our product to be used, or stored in the cupboard. It should be stored like white wine. It is made to be consumed.

Olive Oil and Wine Together
The county’s emerging olive oil industry has become an integral part of the Contra Costa County Winegrowers Association that we began last year. We now have 35 members representing growers who are interested in promoting the local wineries. The destinies of the two industries are tied to each other. We’re trying to get local people to consume locally grown wines and olive oil products.

I’m as passionate about local wines as I am about area olive oil. It should be aggravating to all of us that many local restaurants fail to feature local wines. Some do better with this than others, but for the most part the products of local vineyards are ignored. Local vintner, Jeff Tamayo, makes the disturbing comment that he finds it easier to sell his products in Chicago and in New York than to sell them in most places in Contra Costa County. Not enough East County wine connoisseurs are aware of such facts that Oakley’s Carlas Vineyard’s Zinfandel won a prize as the number one wine in the state last year.

You can help us push local products by complaining to restaurateurs when you eat out if you fail to find local wines featured on their wine lists. “Why don’t you support products from our local wineries?” Tell them how strongly you feel about their neglect in supporting the East County wine industry.

Another thing you can do is to purchase local products yourself. Find the liquor stores and supermarkets that carry local products. If you haven’t done so yet, stop at the Brentwood Wine Store and take a look at the wealth of great products that our local vineyards have been producing. Another place to learn a lot about the wine industry is in my own Brentwood Olive Oil Company Store.

A Store and a Club Promoting the Good Life
We opened our Brentwood Olive Oil Store in 2001. The store features a great variety of of olive oil, gourmet items, and local wines. We also sell gift baskets often featuring seasonal themes, such as Valentine’s Day, Easter, Mothers Day, Christmas, etc.

The olive oil store also has a club, called “Club Vinolivo.” Club members receive a shipment four times a year of a wonderful box of goodies, which includes a bottle of wine, a bottle of olive oil, assorted gourmet items, and recipes. The box is actually a kit containing everything required, excluding the meat, for a classy dinner for four. We also host three club-members-only parties every year. So from the members’ point of view, the club provides great resources for the holidays, occasions of happy camaraderie with other discerning people from the area, as well as an excuse to prepare at least one fine meal on a regular basis without having to think about what to serve or how to prepare it.

Cost of the membership in the club is only $150 per year, which includes the four baskets and the three parties. This insignificant fee doesn’t even cover our per-member expenses. We’re obviously not doing this for profit. The club is an educational tool. Also, the club is a good business move for me because it gives me distribution leverage. I can buy ten cases of some great wine at a good price, for example, because I can use some of the bottles for the club.

My day job is as a Realtor with Summerwood Properties. The name of our agency comes from a combination of “Summerset” and “Brentwood.” I’ve lived in East County for more than 40 years and have always been involved in the community. I was a past president of Rotary, for example, and a member of the Chamber of Commerce Board of Directors. Last year my wife, Lil, and I were honored as the Brentwood Citizens of the Year.

I’ve never been content to do things in a small way and have always had a large attitude towards life. I’m planning in the near future to move my olive oil business to a new location on Sellers Avenue near Concord. I’m building a new home and a larger store. We’ll be growing grapes for my own label, and of course, planting a lot of new olive trees, as well as moving some of my current trees to the new site. The new place will also be home to my olive press. We’ll have wine tasting, olive oil tasting, and a place for people to sit down and eat. They will be able to have some tasty entrée to go along with the great bottle of wine they just bought.

My vision is going to play a small part in the ag/tourism industry that we’re growing in East County. We’re going to put Brentwood on the map.

I’m a board member of the Brentwood Union School Education Foundation. The foundation holds an annual wine tasting and auction as a way to raise money to augment the needs of the teachers. Last year we raised over $22,000 to help promote public education. The auction was a small idea that we began many years ago, but it was an idea that grew into a really good thing — just like my olive oil business is doing.

The Brentwood Olive Oil Company
925-240-6457
store@brentwoodoliveoil.com
www.brentwoodoliveoil.com