Rancho Azul y Oro ~ Surviving the Dream

The figurative dust is settling from what has been just an incredible awards season for Azul y Oro -- 13 awards for the olive oil and three awards for the wine.  One should be pleased with results such as those.  We are.  We are also grateful for the bountiful harvest, our crews, the mill, and our family and friends who not only helped on harvest day, but help by being our biggest fans and spreading the word about our product.   We have been asked by numerous other producers how we accomplished this.   An awards season such as we have had also causes introspection and a look at the eight-page goal list that was compiled in January.   What was learned from that review?   First, that half of those goals have been accomplished, so what then?  Stop and enjoy the summer?  No, we added more goals.  W e looked at what did and didn't work and assessed how we can do things better.  Aren't we satisfied with this year's results?  Yes ...

It's been a busy spring at the rancho.  After the dust of harvest clears and the workers leave, the behind-the-scenes people (yours truly) get busy on getting the olive oil certified, and if that occurs, after the oil has settled a bit, the time comes to bottle, label, prep for the olive competitions and hit the ground running.  There have been improvements along the way.  Our labels have been updated and polished a bit and more standardized.  We have learned to use the new label machine -- although, if one were telling the truth, one would say it is not as user-friendly as we had hoped.  We have an updated, hopefully more user-friendly, website.  We were also thrilled to announce that, in March, our products were actually on store shelves at the Cheese Store in Silverlake, CA, just outside Hollywood.  We had a great day meeting the people who work there and their incredibly enthusiastic customers. We continue to develop new products and use our...

The 2012-2013 olive harvest was our largest since the ranch's inception.  This year required picking crews and delivering our olives to a mill for processing.  Then began the process of submission of our oils for certification as extra virgin olive oil.  We first had to submit samples of our oil for chemical analysis, which we did in January.  We then submitted the oil to the Sensory Tasting Panel at U.C. Davis in February and received notification that our oil had been certified extra virgin.   We then were notified in March that our oil received a silver medal from the California Olive Oil Council in the micro-producer category, and as if that was not enough, we also won a silver medal in the micro-producer category at the Napa Valley Olive Oil Competition in April.   Our attention then immediately turned toward filling out all the paperwork and preparation for a pre-inspection in order to obtain our Processed Food Registr...