Frost Destroys 15% of the Olive Crop in El Comtat
Frost on the night of December 27 ruined about 15 percent of the olive crop in El Comtat, the inland county behind Alicante, which works out at roughly 1.5 million kilos of fruit, according to the local daily Informacion. Here is where the cold bit hardest, why the timing is so bad for these growers, and what frozen olives do to the oil that comes out of them.
What the cold did
The cold came down from the interior of Europe and settled in the valley bottoms, which is where olive trees in this part of Alicante are planted. Cocentaina, the county town, recorded 2 degrees below zero. Onil dropped to 7 below, the Baradello on the edge of Alcoy to 6 below, Alcoy itself and Banyeres to 4 below. In the city of Alicante the thermometer showed 2 below, the coldest December night the city has had since 1962.
Growers had already seen damage two weeks earlier, when temperatures fell under zero for the first time this month. The state weather service has since confirmed two cold spells in December, one around the 16th and 17th and one around the 26th and 27th, both of them bringing hard frosts inland.
The worst of it was in the Vall de Seta, in villages such as Gorga, Balones and Quatretondeta, and around the Benicadell, in the fields of Gaianes and Beniarres. By variety, the blanqueta took the beating, with the manzanella hurt less.
| What | Figure |
|---|---|
| Share of the county crop lost | About 15 percent |
| Fruit ruined | About 1.5 million kilos |
| Low in Cocentaina | 2 degrees below zero |
| Low at Onil | 7 degrees below zero |
| Crop already lost to last winter’s snow | About 3 million kilos |
Why the timing hurts
A frost in a good year is a bad week. A frost in this year is something else. The 2010 crop in El Comtat was already going to be small, partly because the trees were in the low half of their natural two year cycle, and mostly because of last winter’s snow, which snapped branches and split trunks and took about 3 million kilos off production on its own.
That damage has still not been paid for. The affected villages have received no compensation from the regional government or from Madrid, and the employment plans the town halls asked for never arrived, even though Proaguas, the provincial water company, wrote a report on the losses. Growers are now looking at a second winter of damage before the first one has been settled.
What frozen olives do to the oil
Frozen fruit is not worthless, but it is close. When an olive sits for hours below zero the cell walls inside it break down, and the oil that comes out afterwards carries a flat, damp taste that trained tasters call wet wood. There is no fixing it at the mill. The oil can be sold, but only into refining, where it is stripped of flavor, defects and character alike and comes back as part of a blend.
The gap between the two outcomes is the whole story of a grower’s year. Extra virgin is sold on flavor and on the chemistry that goes with it, and even in a season as poor for prices as this one it is worth several times what refining oil fetches. Lampante oil, the grade that has to be refined, follows the world bulk price and is worth a fraction of that. Two nights of frost move fruit from one column to the other.
That is also why the frost matters to buyers further away than Alicante. Blanqueta is a local variety pressed by small cooperatives, and its oil rarely leaves the province in a bottle with its own name on it. What the cold has done here is shift a few hundred thousand liters from the quality market to the refining market, quietly, with nothing on any label to show for it.
Frost damage never shows up on a bottle. The fruit that freezes does not get thrown away: it goes to the refinery, comes back deodorized and colorless, and is blended into the cheap bottles marked simply olive oil. That is the honest use for it. The dishonest one is what the trade worries about every hard winter, which is refined oil finding its way into bottles that say extra virgin, because a hard winter puts more refining oil on the market at exactly the moment when there is less good oil to sell.