| 24 February 2010
Forget yoga class — driving through Niagara is the kind of Zen experience that both relaxes and energizes. A recent visit found my husband and I exploring the many restaurants, shops and wineries we happened to pass. It was at the Upper Canada Cheese Company that we heard of something very neat happening in Niagara. Two wineries had actually started producing and selling their own grape seed oil. Not nearly as well known or extensively used in North America as its viscous brethren produced from olives, peanuts and canola, oil pressed from the seeds of grapes has been popular in Europe for at least 500 years.The story of Ontario grape seed oil actually begins 11 years ago when Joseph Pohorly (owner and winemaker at Joseph’s Estate Wines) decided that there was perhaps a better way to deal with all of the pomace left over from the winemaking process than carting it off to the dump. He got the ball rolling by devising a way to turn that waste into a delicious product. The years that followed saw him exploring the best method of extracting the tiny bit of oil stored in each seed. He purchased the necessary equipment, and by 2002, was producing and selling grape seed oil on site. Stratus Winery recently followed suit with its own version. Southbrook Winery, too, toyed with the idea. Owner Bill Redelmeier collaborated with Vinifera for Life co-founder Mark Walpole last year to create a very small test-batch of unfiltered oil. “It was incredibly flavourful, really pungent,” says Redelmeier. “It tasted like a cross between olive oil and sesame seed oil.”
| 04 February 2010
There’s a revolution happening in Spain. Actually, it’s been raging for well over a decade, if not two. Old ways and ideas are being tried, judged heretical and executed. A new religion based on quality and character is driving out the old, the tired, the bland. Where quantity ruled, quality is usurping. Fresh, distinct and individual are the new sacred verses. Though it’s not an ecclesiastical upheaval per se, it is altering (pardon the pun) the nature of one of Spain’s most revered consumables.
Wine, you say? Been there, done that. Spain nailed (ahem) the wine thing eons ago. It’s the nectar of another fruit: a juice that is treated with the same reverence, the same intense passion and, in fact, the same degree of experimentation and technical ingenuity lavished on the country’s finest vintages. We’re talking extra virgin olive oil — the new Spanish doubloon. Spain’s 2.3 million hectares of olive groves (encompassing some 350 million individual trees) were first planted during the time of the Phoenicians who landed in the country around 1050 BCE. Today, over 1,700 producers press about 90 million kilograms of olives per harvest year. The bulk of production lies in the southern areas with the region of Andalucía accounting for almost half of the total output.
