Brescia Garda Olive Oil Production Yields High-Quality Extra Virgin Oil
The milling has been completed for the olive presses produced on the Brescia shore of Garda, and now the oil, which has all tested as extra virgin, is being prepared for consumption.
As Gianfranco Comincioli (former president of Aipol and producer in Puegnago, where he also serves as mayor) observed, it has been a good year, but not one of the best in terms of yield.
“The fault lies with the olive fly, which appeared sporadically in the lake area, as well as with the hail that suddenly cooled the temperature toward the end of September. Still, the oil is classified as extra virgin because it has an acidity that does not exceed one degree, which is the limit to remain in the extra virgin category.”
In some areas, the oil achieved a maximum acidity of 0.50, with averages elsewhere ranging from 0.20 to 0.4.
Quantity and Production Area
It should be noted that in the Valtenesi area, particularly, many new trees have been planted recently and are starting to produce, so the quantity remains high even in less favorable seasons.
The olive trees in our province have reached a total of 350,000, of which 300,000 are in the Garda bresciano area, where over 5,000 quintals of oil are produced annually, while around 1,000 quintals come from Lake Iseo.
According to data provided by Aipol, headed by Giovanni Mazzoldi, 80% of the olive oil production in all of Lombardy comes from olive groves on the Brescia shore of Lake Garda.
Therefore, this also represents an important and significant economic entity.
Businesses and Product Quality
In Puegnago, about twenty farms have voluntarily joined since 1984, bringing olives from Nicola Morani in Polpenazze, where a traditional mill with granite crusher stones processes the oil at cold temperatures.
Only these producers delivered about one thousand quintals of olives to the mill.
At San Felice del Benaco, instead, Cooperativa “La Verità” has 220 member producers, who delivered a total of 3,700 quintals of olives to the state-of-the-art large cooperative facility.
The cooperative’s president (also of Aipol and the Garda Bresciano Olive Growing Consortium), Giovanni Mazzoldi, states that the quantity of olives on the trees was above average, but the yield was lower than last year, by three kilograms per quintal: in practice, one quintal of olives in the previous production year yielded 16 kilograms of oil, whereas in the current year, it produced 13 kilograms.
“In any case, it is high-quality oil, moving toward DOP (Denomination of Protected Origin) certification, which can already be marked on bottles from companies that have requested and obtained the certification (Garda Bresciano DOP for us, and Laghi Lombardi for Iseo and Como).”