Get to Know Spanish Olive Oil

Tim Balshi and Soaray Aguilar tasting olive oil

The next time you reach into your pantry for a bottle of Italian extra virgin olive oil, take a look at the ingredients on the back label. Chances are it contains a blend of oils of Mediterranean origin, with a heavy emphasis on Spain. It’s no wonder, given that Europe’s fourth-largest country produces 45% of the world’s “liquid gold,” as Homer memorably dubbed olive oil in his epic the Iliad.

Why that Spanish oil got relabeled as Italian is a story that spans centuries and many thousands of producers but boils down to a simple truth: despite its culinary mastery, Spain has a marketing problem.

Tim Balshi, who co-founded Seasons Olive Oil & Vinegar, explains, “Italy just doesn’t have the scale that Spain has, but they’re the best commercializers of products that are bottled in Italy. Italians can sell anything.”

This is true, say most experts. Some, including Juan José Martínez Ortiz de Zárate, general manager at La Caminera Country Club in Ciudad Real, in central Spain, believe there is an opportunity to distinguish their products from those of its Mediterranean cousins. Hospitality venues like La Caminera, which has its own modest olive grove, are tapping into the rich history of Spanish oil with in-person orchard visits and tasting experiences. “The quality of the olive oil production has improved dramatically in the last ten or fifteen years,” he says. “Most of the producers are small. They’re making single-varietal oils of exceptional quality.”

Olive oil production in Spain: ancient and modern history

Seasons olive oil

Spain wasn’t the first to press olive oil—that honor most likely goes to the Middle East—but olive trees have been cultivated there since the Roman invasion of Hispania (modern-day Portugal and Spain) in the second century BCE.

The region’s dry, arid climate was so hospitable to olive trees that the oil business boomed. Roman colonizers exported hundreds of gallons annually back to the homeland. Rome’s Monte Testaccio, a 115-foot hill made up almost entirely of shards of discarded terracotta amphorae that once held gallons of olive oil, bears testament to their passion for the green stuff, much of which came from Spain.

Fast forward to 1955, and Deoleo, S.A. became the first supersize Spanish multinational olive oil processing company. They now sell more than 50 million gallons of oil per year to 30-plus brands, including supermarket mainstays like Bertolli and Carapelli. While this is partially because of Spain’s ability to produce large quantities of consistent product, it’s also due to the spread of olive quick decline syndrome (OQDS), caused by the treatment-resistant plant pathogen Xylella fastidiosa, which has reduced Italy’s olive oil production by 10 percent since 2013.

Spanish producers have not intentionally capitalized on Italy’s misfortune, but there’s no denying that it has presented an opening.

Antonio Gomez of Sancho Food

Antonio Gomez, who grew up in an olive oil‒producing family, was inspired to establish the boutique brand Sancho Food in La Mancha, a traditional wine-producing region, ten years ago. He says, “[Spanish] extra virgin olive oil has been exported for so many decades, only in bulk, and mainly to Italy. It was very frustrating to see my family producing really outstanding quality EVOO, and it was exported. I wanted the product to talk about the territory and the people and something that is ancient. I wanted people to be able to see the yearlong work of these small family farmers.”

Today, all but two of Spain’s autonomous communities grow olives. The far southern region of Andalusia, known for its sultry climate and its sherries, has more than 4 million acres of olive groves. It’s the world’s largest oil-producing region by far, with most operations centered around the province of Jaén. In the Maestrat region of Castellón, along the eastern coast in Valencia, still-productive 2,000-year-old olive trees stand like sentinels along what was once the Vía Augusta, a Roman thoroughfare that cut through the Iberian Peninsula.

In the five years prior to the drought-reduced yields of 2022 and 2023, Spain produced an average of 1.4 million tons of oil annually. The recent abundance—and, in some cases, overabundance—of rain has proved promising for this year’s harvest.

The Spanish distinction

Spain currently grows more than 200 varieties of olives, about 30 of which are used for culinary olive oil. Even within those couple dozen species, the flavors, intensity, and aromas range dramatically.

Veinticuatro de Jahén, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons

Picual, Spain’s most popular olive, hails from the south and is now cultivated in many regions around the world. Once pressed, it has hint of bitterness and peppery bite. The yellowish-green manzanilla (“little apple” in English), grown throughout Andalusia, is the most common table olive in Spain, with a mild aroma and a nutty, briny flavor that makes it versatile for a variety of dishes. The cornicabra, a medium-sized fruit which gets its name, “goat horn,” from its curved, vaguely hornlike shape—is intense and spicy, with a pronounced fruity aroma.

One of Spain’s most distinctive olives comes from the humble, eponymous Campo Real, a town of about 6,000 residents an hour east of Madrid. Nearly fluorescent green, with a firm texture and herbaceous flavor, the Campo Real olive is so sought after, some eateries in Madrid, such as legendary sherry bar La Venecia, serve only these olives.

To make its culinary oils, the town’s top producer, the private Almazara Campo Real, uses a blend of manzanilla carrasqueña and cornicabra olives, from about 300 regional farms. The blend, according to production manager Julian Barco, “achieves a very interesting balance in aromas and flavors, with green aromas predominating, and a medium bitterness and spiciness.”

For Balshi, the biggest distinction between Spanish and other Mediterranean oils is the quality of the fruit. “It’s like growing apples in upstate New York,” Balshi says. “You have a rotten apple at a farm next to yours, where the farmer’s not taking care of the fruit, and you’re not going to have good cider or eating apples.” When olive growers are mutually invested in maintaining their groves, he explains, the result is a wealth of top-tier products for chefs and consumers to choose from.

Soraya Aguilar inspecting the olives

Soraya Aguilar, cofounder of Seasons Olive Oil & Vinegar, whose family farm in Linares produces the Seasons brand’s line of oils, adds that agricultural science in Spain has advanced by leaps and bounds over the past two decades, with research dedicated to improving the health of the trees, the quality of the fruit, and the equipment for processing. Still, she says, “It’s about the craftsmanship. We harvest by hand, and our olives never touch the ground. We’re very careful that they come to the mill in the right condition, and we start pressing within a couple hours of harvest.”

This, Martínez says, represents the biggest change in Spanish olive oil: producers now approach it similarly to how vintners have long approached wine. “In Spain, we always sold wines, lots of wines, but medium-range price. You went to Italy or France to find great wines.”

Now, Martínez says, the focus is on creating a product that is uniquely Spanish, and that highlights its singular landscape and blend of Old World wisdom and New World techniques. “We still have large-production olive oil here. But now we have early-harvest, exceptional-quality olive oils, which are very well presented, and we never did that so well before,” Martínez says.

He shrugs and finishes, “We just have to carve out our place in the market.”