The Good Oil from Murrinstone Olives – How to Produce a Gold Medal EVOO?

Peter and Kerry Tull ‘Oil for the Soul’ are thrilled to again achieve success with both their Leccino (Gold) and Frantoio (Bronze) oils at the Fine Food Awards. This year we were onlookers when our oil was processed by Rob Mitchell the President of the Goulburn Strathbogie Olive Growers Association, and we were very pleased with how the oil presented.

All Rob’s doing we’re sure. Then when the GSOGA held the Post Harvest Fest to the Gods we knew we had something special with the Leccino, after the Victorian Sensory Tasting Panel report noted its ‘intense licorise aroma and taste.

Passion fruit notes, sweeter buttery flavours with a delayed spicy finish’. This is the third year of solid production and competition entry, we decided to enter each harvest into competitions as this gives us the advantage of knowing where we are sitting within the industry, sort of bench marking I guess.

We now know that we are producing a quality product and also as we’ve put a huge amount of effort into designing and marketing our product, to make sure we’ve not only got the best product but that people know about it to. We feel we have achieved great results in a short time. We are now reaping the rewards Success doesn’t come easy though, a lot of work goes into the grove to ensure a quality end product.

Spraying, keeping up the watering system sprinklers is an endless task, tying up trees after the terrible winds we have had, and those pesky birds. We don’t deny that we have had problems, mostly pest, but we don’t believe there would be many groves that don’t have these problems. Once you set a program and adhere to the steps then the process becomes a lot easier and the problems less intrusive. We also have the services of our local agronomist.

It can also be a costly affair depending on what you want to do, we have chosen to have soil testing done yearly to ensure that we have the correct program for fertilizing, and we do both fertigation and granual. We also have the leaves tested yearly to see how the plant is travelling.

Then there is the cost of testing the oil for FFA and other tests for the showing of oils. When we are asked “how do you produce a gold medal olive oil?” – well that’s hard to answer, its not just one thing, there are a lot of pieces of the puzzle to fit together.

Processes during the season are extremely important, then in the end it does come down to picking and processing, this year we were able to pick with a shaker, and have our olives to the processing unit quite quickly and then they were processed straight away, I believe processing is a very important part of the process and we are grateful that we have the team we do and they are not to far away from our grove.

I would also like to make mention of the GSOGA Committee we have been members for two years now and this is a great way to meet and talk to like-minded people. GSOGA offers a number of ways to learn about the olive industry and are a group of people that are on call for anyone to discuss grove issues. We would encourage everyone to become involved in the GSOGA as the benefit is there for those who wish to be involved.