Organoleptic Characteristics

The oil is a golden-yellow color with green highlights. The smell expresses tomato and cardoon tones, while in the mouth intense bitter and peppery sensations emerge, accompanied by herbal, grassy notes.

The Corniola Cultivar

Trees of the Corniola cultivar are only rarely found in the High Ionian area of Cosenza and the area around Mount Pollino, although this cultivar is known all over Calabria, Basiliacata and Campania. The trees are imposing and vigorous, able to grow even on dry, fallow land. The olives, elongated and asymmetrical, have very flavorful pulp and are well suited both to being brined green or dried when black. Furthermore, they have a very high yield when used for oil. Despite the many good qualities of this cultivar, local nurseries do not stock it, and until we intervened, no new trees had been planted in our area for many, many years. About ten years ago, as an experiment, we asked a local nursery to propagate 100 plants for us using cuttings taken from old Corniola trees on our land and grafting them onto wild trees. In 1999 the young trees were ready to be set out, and we decided to place them on some of our land that had been left fallow for a long time. This piece land is known in the local dialect as "u vallu da' Vrica" (in Italian, la valle dei Ginepri and in English "The Valley of Junipers") because junipers grow wild there. In 2007, eight years on, we for the first time harvested olives from the young Corniola trees, and decided to name the oil after the little valley that is now home to this ancient and little-known cultivar.

OIL ANALYSIS "VALLE DEI GINEPRI" JANUARY 2008 (ITA)