21 Years making Olive Oil - 'It's New Zealand in a cup'

Nalini Baruch's passion for olives and their oil pours from her as easily as the greeny gold liquid trickling from the olive press.

"To me this is New Zealand in a cup," she says reaching for a small vial of the oil from Lot 8's twenty-first harvest of olives.

She sniffs and slurps, sucking in air and rolling the oil around to coat all parts of her finely tuned palate.

"It's not the most dignified part of what we do," she laughs.

Nalini and her husband Colin are among Wairarapa's first generation of olive oil producers and the shelves in their tasting room now boast an array of award-winning extra virgin and flavoured olive oils.

Their business has grown over a quarter of a century to include a family of around 15 contract growers around Martinborough in South Wairarapa.

It's a crisp late autumn day when Country Life pops into Andrew and Nicola Smith's grove where the Baruchs are watching leccino olives being harvested.

"What used to take us two people and almost sometimes up to four to five minutes now takes us 20 seconds," Nalini explains.

The Italian-made harvester clamps and shakes a tree, dropping the leccino olives into an umbrella-like net below.

"And no trees are harmed in the shaking," Nalini smiles.

They have harvested some Frantoio already and there will be Barnea and Koroneiki to come over the next few weeks.

It was Colin who convinced Nalini they should get involved with olives back in the late 1990s but they didn't expect to have a commercial crop so soon.

His father came to New Zealand from California in the 1950s and started investing in the primary sector, piquing Colin's interest too.

"We'd grown up with olives around us ... Dad always received cans of olives from the relatives in California."

Tasting their first harvest made the Baruchs realise they were onto something.

"There was just that green taste, the weather, the earth, the trees, the sky that came through that drop ... we knew we were part of a very exciting adventure going forward," Nalini said.

They both had busy lives in Wellington, Nalini as a barrister and Colin working in human resources.

"I thought it was an opportunity to do something without the complexities of grapes etc that would have required me to be on the land a lot sooner," Colin said.

They were advised it would take about eight years for their trees to produce but within five they had a crop that was big enough to be commercial.

"From that we had to do something and there was nobody who wanted to buy fruit so that's how Lot 8 moved from being a grower into having to be end to end."

Born in Fiji and of Indian heritage, Nalini puts her finely-tuned palate and ability to blend the oils for New Zealand chefs down to a rich foody experience as a child.

"I've grown up on mustard and soya and fenugreek ... it's been part of my life, oils, on a daily basis," she said.

"Everything (food) was created from raw ingredients. You minced your own garlic, your coriander, you cracked the coconut, you scraped the flesh and you made milk.

"That basic understanding of food certainly helps with what I produce for the market."

This year has been a magical one for the olives, she says, with rain at the right time and little wind at the important flowering period.

Maturing has come a couple of weeks earlier this year too.

Harvest time can be bitterly cold and wet as well as a battle with the starlings and frost but the couple have learnt to be prepared with flu jabs and a more relaxed attitude to keep the stress at bay.

"Birds are very clever, they will sit as a group on a net, they will bounce on it and one will feed while the others are bouncing. We've seen it happen," Nalini explained.

"We have learnt over the years you just have to share some of the harvest with them."

They also don't rush to the press.

"In the early days we use to strive to get it picked and pressed within six hours and then we did a bit of research and the Euopeans said to us, you know, there's no harm in leaving it overnight and pressing it the next day.

"You get more oil out of the fruit if it has that slight resting period as long as it's not warm."  

Nalini's constantly on the look out for new flavours to add to her oils and lately has expanded the line to include the yuzu fruit and New Zealand native herbs.

The couple would like to see more education around the industry and suggest levying growers to enable more research and development to enable expansion and economies of scale.

"We make really high quality oil in this country and that's because of the care that goes into producing  this," Nalini said.

"I'm known as someone who's quite emotional when it comes to my products and you can see why.

"Its hard not to be," she says cupping the vial of oil as another load of olives is hammered into a guacamole-like paste.

The oil starts to release and glisten against the metal of the paddle.

"I'm hoping there's a little bit of grassiness but I'm also hoping to taste ... sort of a butteriness ... and that's exactly what I've found," she says holding up the oil to the light.

"It's like the birth of a child in your hand."