A two day, “Olive Odyssey” event will be held in northern California wine country on the second weekend in February at the Jacuzzi winery in Sonoma Valley. The purpose of which is to celebrate olives for those who grow them and those who enjoy them, with a bounty of growers’ and curers’ offerings available for sampling, as well as olive oils from the Olive Press. There will be a number of seminars by experts on related subject matter over the weekend. Also on hand will be olive related art, olive cooking exhibitions and how to best pair wines with the various olive types and curing techniques.
While olives have been growing in this country for two hundred years and groves have expanded in both Sonoma County and Napa County, the entire state of California is still a small producer of olives, with just fifty thousand acres of olive groves currently in existence. This pales in comparison to Europe, where in Spain alone there are almost six million acres devoted to olives. The olive is known to have existed at least seven thousand years ago and there are more than two thousand four hundred varieties.
It remains a mystery to this day as to how man came to an appreciation of the fruit and discovered techniques to make the olive enjoyable since when on the tree, they are extremely bitter, even when fully ripened. The best hypothesis might be the one which mimics one of the curing techniques involving salt, presuming that someone ate an olive that has fallen and spent time in the salt water of the Mediterranean. Curing techniques today include oil curing, water curing, salt-pack dry curing, and fermentation using sugar and salt in a Sicilian style, or by using salt brine in a Greek style. Whatever method might be used, the curing process leaches the bitterness from the fruit. The most common method is curing with lye, as it is the most rapid process. But many believe that the quickest doesn’t meant the best, as the lye doesn’t leach out the bitterness, but rather destroys it, along with the inherent vitamins and proteins, along with some of the taste. Discover for yourself what types of olives and curing techniques appeal most to you and celebrate the “Olive Odyssey” this weekend in Sonoma Valley.
