A guide to understanding, appreciating, and enjoying olives at their very best.
Not all olives are created equal. At Oakhurst Olives, we believe in empowering people to understand the difference between ordinary and exceptional. From flavour to texture, true quality can be seen, smelt, and tasted.
Step into our Tasting Room for a complete sensory journey through the flavours of Tulbagh. Sample our extra virgin olive oils, savour our naturally cured Kalamata olives, and enjoy our vegetarian tapenade, free from anchovies.
The first impression of an olive is in its look. A quality table olive should have an appealing, natural appearance, plump, consistent, and inviting.
A well-prepared olive has a clean, fresh aroma. Any off-notes or unpleasant fermentation smells are a sign of poor processing.
Olive flavour varies widely, but great table olives achieve balance. A good Kalamata offers fruitiness with subtle acidity and salinity, never bland, never overly harsh.
The flesh of a quality olive is firm yet tender, with skin that isn’t too tough and flesh that comes away easily from the pit.
Knowing what to look for helps consumers appreciate authentic olives and avoid products that compromise on flavour or quality. Just as with wine, developing an understanding of olive characteristics opens the door to a richer, more rewarding experience.
At Oakhurst Olives, every Kalamata olive we produce is hand-harvested, naturally cured, and carefully monitored for quality, so you can enjoy olives as they should be: pure, flavourful, and full of character.
With their roots firmly planted in the granite and sandstone soils, our olive trees bask in the abundant summer sunshine. By complete contrast, winters are cold and crisp with snow-capped mountain peaks. The result is disease-free trees that yield healthy fruit with a distinctive flavour profile.
Following extensive research into industry practices and trends worldwide, Oakhurst Olives has adopted a high-density planting approach in our groves. This facilitates orchard management and boosts production per hectare without compromising quality. Energy inputs are channelled into productive tree volume rather than large woody structure, allowing trees to come into bearing earlier. Less vigorous trees result in orchards being more efficient, sustainable and manageable.
By reducing tree height, we reduce harvesting costs significantly. Currently, about half of the production at Oakhurst Olives is Kalamata table olives, and half is Extra Virgin Olive Oil.
The Oakhurst Extra Virgin Olive Oil is made of a blend of the fruits from 10 different varieties. Maurino, Arbequina and Koroneiki form the basis for our delicate EVOO blend, while Coratina, Picual and Frantoio usually give structure to the Intense blend. Mission, Leccino are the main components of our Medium blend EVOO.
Each year, from April to June, our entire crop is carefully hand-harvested at optimum ripeness to ensure premium quality fruit for processing. Oil olives are milled on site within 24 hours of harvest in our state-of-the-art Pieralisi cold-extracted processing plant to capture the aromas and flavours of freshly harvested fruit. The oil is filtered, cool-stored in stainless steel tanks in our olive oil cellar and bottled on demand to guarantee freshness.
Oakhurst Kalamata table olives are produced from the genuine sought-after Kalamata cultivar, a firm, meaty olive with a delicious flavour and texture, and attractive aubergine colour, ideal for natural slow processing according to traditional fermentation. Table olives are hand-picked individually and selectively in the orchard, sorted and carefully placed onto fermentation tanks in our curing cellar.
Ripe fresh olives, which are too bitter to be edible when harvested, are transformed into this most delicious product by a natural controlled fermentation process in a salt brine, where, over the course of a year, fruit sugar is slowly transformed into organic acids by selected yeasts. This acidity is then able to preserve the fruit without the need for any added artificial preservatives or pasteurisation. Oakhurst Kalamata olives are delicious and healthy, being rich in beneficial antioxidants, probiotics and monounsaturated-rich olive oil.
