HOA Newsletter August 23
Hunter Olive Association Olive Oil Appreciation Day
On August 20th, a fairly small group of members gathered in the Masonic Hall at Cessnock. Steve Mitchell, our head judge for the HOA show, and with years of national judging behind him, shared his knowledge of how to assess olive oils. He had a selection of mild, medium and robust extra virgin oils, some beautiful show award winning samples and a few not so good (some of these
still being sold commercially under misleading names). He also presented some additional information sent from Soumi Mukhopadhyay, one of our international judges, who helped with last year’s presentation, but couldn’t come on Sunday.
Most of those present brought samples of their own harvest, Elizabeth Williams (Milbrodale Farm) had a Manzanillo oil, Dirk Ashburner brought one from Adina, and one came from Belabula (these last two were Frantoio oils) James Lunin brought green table fruit. (manzanillo and green kalamata) Jim and Marie Kearns had black Kalamata and green Picholine and Michele Mackey was the only one with this year’s fruit which she had processed more quickly by cracking them. Steve went through all of these with us, assessing their attributes as he would judging in a show. A smaller group does enable good discussion, all were happy to ask questions, which Steve could answer in depth, and at the end of the day we had all learnt a lot to practise to develop our tasting skills.
Many thanks Steve