Oh the Wonders of Olive Oil...

Last Sunday my roommate Sadie and I decided to be cultural and see a new side of La Rioja that we hadn’t seen before. We signed up for a trip to see how olive oil was made. For some reason I pictured that we would be walking through olive groves and picking the olives ourselves, which we definitely didn’t do, but it was still such an incredible trip! I didn’t realize how much work went into actually making olive oil. It’s not as simple as taking an olive and rubbing it in between your hands until it turns to olive oil (as I once thought peanut butter was made that way haha). The entire process is quite complicated and takes quite some time to complete. First the olives are picked from the grove (well duh haha) and then they are brought to the “warehouse” and are dumped into bins. The olives are then cleaned and sorted. Once they are clean they go through a multi step process of heating them to the exact temperature to melt them. Once all of that is said and done they separate the water from the olive oil, so as to get the purest form. The oil is then taken to another facility to go through another purification process and then is brought back to be stored in huge bins, for lack of a better word.

            We went to two facilities on the trip, one that was family run and operated and very old, and the other that was a huge manufacturing plant that produces the greatest quantity of olive oil in La Rioja. We were able to try the olive oil at the smaller place and all I needed was some bread and I would have been in heaven! After visiting the two places and driving through some of the most beautiful countryside and mountains I have ever seen, we stopped at an olive oil restaurant in a town called Arnedo.  The restaurant is called Zeytum (www.deolivavirgenextra.es) in case anyone is interested haha. It is a tiny shop and we were ushered to the back where the owner (who was on the trip with us) and his wife had set up a beautiful table and proceeded to show us the wonders of olive oil and how to properly taste it. This part of the trip was amazing, as I had previously assumed you just tasted the olive oil and that was that. However it is a much more complicated process to truly get the flavor of the olive oil and is very similar to tasting wine properly. In actuality there are many different types of olive oil and all of them smell and taste and look different. Some are clear, some are slightly yellow and some of them even are green! We also were given some chocolates that were made with olive oil. Man oh man was I in heaven then! The whole trip was fantastic and Sadie and I have vowed to return to the store to buy up the whole place haha.