Olivaia's OLA Makes NY Times' T List

"While it’s tempting to ration a nice olive oil, the liquid in the bottle is extremely perishable. According to the North American Olive Oil Association, a container should generally be drained within three months of opening to avoid oxidation, so you may as well splash it around un-self-consciously, and replenish it frequently. When it comes time to try a new one, go for an oil that can be traced to its origin, a strong signifier of quality. Agricola Maraviglia’s oil comes from the Tuscan farm where one of its founders grew up, and where today they prune and pick by hand. After mapping his lineage to Sicily, the owner of a plant nursery in South Carolina returned to his ancestral land to launch Aulive last year, using succulent Nocellara del Belice olives. The founders of Olivaia’s OLA spent half a decade rehabilitating an abandoned estate in California’s Central Valley, nurturing century-old trees to produce a fruity blend of nine distinct cultivars. Oro di Milas, on the other hand, uses only Memecik olives grown in an ancient Mediterranean province of Turkey, earning the EU’s Protected Designation of Origin, which certifies the provenance of both the olive and the finished product. Across the Aegean, Koroneiki olives from farmers in Messenia, Greece, fill Psyche Organic’s sleek pouches, which have spigot dispensers that help preserve the oil in an airless chamber. By summer, when the Northern Hemisphere oils harvested the previous fall are passing their prime, Familia Zuccardi in Mendoza, Argentina, is just getting to work milling the Arauco olive, which has a spicy, tomato-like juiciness — ensuring that shoppers always have something freshly pressed to pour."

Reference

The T List: Six Things we Recommend this Week