Sierra Magina’s Picual Oils Win Their Best Year Yet
A silver medal in Los Angeles has closed the best awards season the Sierra Magina denomination has ever had, in the worst price year its growers can remember. Two mills in the Jaen mountains did most of the winning, and what they won says something useful about picual, the variety nobody used to enter in competitions.
The season’s haul
The medal that finished the run went to Aceites Campoliva of Pegalajar, for its Melgarejo Seleccion Gourmet, at the extra virgin olive oil competition held with the county fair in Los Angeles. The denomination’s regulating council says the 2008/09 campaign brought it more recognition than any campaign before it.
Two companies carried most of it. Campoliva at Pegalajar and Monva at Mancha Real, whose brand is Dominus, were both listed among the world’s best oils by the German magazine Der Feinschmecker, and both were finalists for the Gran Picual prize at Expoliva in Jaen in the spring. Campoliva added a finalist place in the International Olive Council’s Mario Solinas award, a prize for intense fruity oils at the Armonia competition in Italy, the Alcuza prize awarded by the Sierra Magina council itself, and then the Californian silver.
Behind those two there is a second rank that matters more for the region’s future: the organic cooperative Trujal de Magina at Cambil, the growers’ group Nuestra Senora de la Esperanza, and the cooperatives Cristo de la Misericordia at Jodar, Santa Isabel at Torres and Nuestra Senora de la Paz at Belmez de la Moraleda, all of which took runner up places in the council’s own competition. Brands including Conde de Argillo, La Quinta Esencia and Verde Salud showed at the extra virgin salon held alongside Expoliva.
Why picual winning is news
Picual is the workhorse of Jaen and of Spanish olive oil in general. It is productive, it is robust, its oil is stable and keeps well, and for decades it was treated as the variety you grow when you are producing volume, while the medals went to softer, more aromatic oils from other regions and other varieties.
The council’s own reading of this season is that mountain grown picual has a quality potential that competitions are finally recognizing. That is a fair claim and worth unpacking. Groves at altitude ripen later and more slowly, the fruit comes in cooler, and the oil keeps more of its green, bitter, peppery character if the mill works fast. The difference between a dull picual and a striking one is rarely the variety. It is the altitude, the picking date and the hours between tree and mill.
If you have only ever met picual as an anonymous supermarket Spanish blend, the field guide to Spanish varieties is a good place to see where it sits, and the results lists from competitions like the Los Angeles olive oil competition are a practical way of finding the producers who take it seriously.
Medals against a falling price
The timing is bleak and the council says so openly. Growers in Jaen have spent the winter protesting about prices at origin below the cost of production, and in that context quality differentiation stops being a marketing slogan and becomes the only lever a small mill has.
- Awards do not lift the bulk price, which is set by stocks and by the big buyers.
- They do help a mill sell bottled oil at its own price, to shops and restaurants that want a name.
- They also concentrate attention on a denomination as a whole, which is why councils invest in entering competitions at all.
The honest limit is that the bottled market in Spain is small compared with the tanker market. A cooperative that wins a medal and sells 5 percent of its production in bottles is still selling 95 percent into the same weak market as everyone else.
The same mill can produce a competition lot and a commodity lot in the same season. The award goes to a specific tank, often early picked and milled fast, sometimes just a few thousand liters. If you want to buy what won, buy the named selection with a harvest date, not the standard label from the same house, which may be a perfectly good oil but is a different thing.