29 Nov

Harvest brings gourmet McEvoy olive oil

By Rob Rogers,

At the McEvoy Ranch, the end of the harvest season comes not with the arrival of turkey, cranberry sauce or stuffing, but with the bottling of “olio nuovo” – a bright-green, strong-tasting oil made from the 550-acre ranch’s freshest olives.

Like almost all of the olive oil produced at the northern Marin ranch – which generates almost all the olive oil produced in Marin – the “olio nuovo” is certified organic, made in small quantities and, at $22 per 375 milliliters, designed more for the gourmand than the casual cook.

“Olives are a small-margin crop,” said Paul Vossen, an olive specialist for the University of California’s Cooperative Extension. “The yields are fairly low, and it’s difficult and expensive to harvest – so when you do, you create a product that is quite costly to produce. But compared to common olive oils on your supermarket shelf, almost all California olive oil is going to be fresher and better-tasting.”

Before publishing heiress Nan Mc Evoy planted her first 1,000 olive trees in 1991, olives had been a part of the California landscape for more than a century. Yet few of those olives were grown for oil, Vossen said.

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