Malta Revives Its Olive Oil, One Small Mill at a Time

Maltese olive oil is making a comeback: after centuries in which the islands’ olive groves gave way to cotton, sheep and citrus, farmers are planting thousands of trees a year, and Malta now has nine registered olive mills. Between them they press only about 28 tons of oil a year. Here is how the revival happened, what makes Maltese oil different, and why a tiny producer is worth watching.

An old tradition, nearly lost

Olives are nothing new on Malta, Gozo and Comino. Olive growing flourished under the Phoenicians and the Romans, local place names still carry the memory, and some trees on the islands are said to be more than 1,000 years old. The village of Żebbuġ takes its name from the Maltese word for olives.

Then the groves faded. As Olive Oil Times tells the story this week, cotton replaced olives under Arab rule, sheep farming took over under the British, and later orange and almond trees took their place, until many islanders left farming altogether for the more profitable tourist trade. Slow Food, which lists Malta’s native bidni olive in its Ark of Taste of endangered foods, adds that colonial rule shifted the islands toward timber.

The revival

In recent years both farmers and townspeople have come back to the tree. “Thousands of olive trees” are being planted every year, according to Denis Bezzina of BSS, a family-owned agricultural supply company in Żebbuġ that imports young trees and runs one of the mills. Now those trees are maturing and bearing fruit. The Malta Environment and Planning Authority protects olive groves through Special Areas of Conservation, and a permit is needed to prune, fell or uproot protected trees.

Those two small presses were enough for the whole country only a decade ago. Demand has grown so fast that more mills had to open, and BSS inaugurated its new mill in October with Malta’s agriculture minister, Roderick Galdes, and the company’s director general, Godfrey Bezzina. Guests tasted the fresh oil with traditional Maltese dishes made from it.

The bidni olive

The real prize is the native variety. Slow Food describes the bidni tree as hardy and imposing, with small elliptical fruit that ripens to dark purple in late October or early November, and an oil that is low in acidity, rich in polyphenols and prized locally. It also says the bidni resists the olive fly better than many Mediterranean varieties. We reported back in 2007 on the first indigenous Maltese trees being replanted; the mills are the next step.

The threat, according to Slow Food, is the wave of imported Italian cultivars such as Frantoio, Leccino, Carolea and Coratina, which are easy to buy and quick to crop. “Clearly, the size of our islands does not permit that we compete with much larger olive oil producing countries, when it comes to quantities,” Denis Bezzina says. The case for Maltese oil is quality, a unique taste and local pride.

• 28 tons a year is a rounding error in world terms; one large Spanish mill can press more in a day at the height of the harvest.
• The native bidni is what makes Maltese oil Maltese; imported varieties make good oil, but not a distinct one.
• Protected groves and permits keep old trees in the ground, which is more than many bigger producers manage.

Sources

• Olive Oil Times: An Olive Grove in Malta (December 28, 2013)
• Slow Food Foundation for Biodiversity: Ark of Taste, Bidni olive