Rancho Azul y Oro ~ Surviving the Dream

We're pleased to share that Rancho Azul y Oro has been honored with three medals in the Napa Valley Olive Oil Competition: A Silver Medal for our Estate Extra Virgin Olive Oil, a Silver Medal for our Orange-Infused Olive Oil, and a Bronze Medal for our Lemon-Infused Olive Oil. With this announcement comes the end of our competition year, a full-court press to finish bottling and labeling, taking advantage of every opportunity to market and share the oil with you (Translation: Buy Olive Oil). This stage also causes us to review and reflect upon how we can improve things next year, call it our New Year's in May: Avoid rookie mistakes:  Review established procedures each year and follow them to avoid errors we made when we were newbies that shouldn't be happening.  Most mistakes happen when we're in a hurry and there is a price to be paid for haste. Refine and Rework:  Crafting recipes to infuse olive oil is rocket science, combined with art, as are many bus...

It was announced today by the Yolo County Olive Oil Competition that Rancho Azul y Oro won a Gold Medal for it's Estate Extra Virgin Olive Oil and a Best of Class Medal for our Arbequina Blend, Robust Intensity.  AyO was also awarded a Silver Medal for both its Lemon-Infused Olive Oil and its Orange-Infused Olive Oil. The Yolo County Olive Oil Competition is the second largest olive oil competition in the U.S., second only to the L.A. Cunty Fair Wine and Olive Oil Competition.   Discover California's newest gold for yourself, why not try some of our award-winning olive oil?

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 rancho just received the good news that our 2014-15 olive oil has been certified extra virgin.  Besides the stewards of the rancho, possibly only one other person knows how much work went into bringing in a crop from last year -- possibly one of the most difficult growing seasons on record.  One has only to read the blog for the last year to catch a glimpse of discouraging news layered upon angst layered upon challenges from nature layered upon -- one gets the picture.  After a particularly cruel freak hail storm, it was thought the entire crop was destroyed. And yet, we continued on toward our goal, which was seemingly ridiculous to most, because we were focused on achieving extra virgin certification when most people kept commenting that they couldn't see any olives.  We could, though, and persevered on through snakes, construction, battles against other pests, low crop yields, coyote attacks, and finding a mill that would accept us with a low crop yield. ...

In the old days (three or four years ago), there were down times at the ranch, such as summer and winter.  It could be said that it was because the plantings were not so mature and required far less work, which is, in part, true.  Experienced farmers, wine grape growers, and vintners probably know better.  Slowly, it is becoming evident that free time was abundant because we did not know we were supposed to be doing certain things on a regular schedule, such as spraying the vines, olives and lavender (yes, even the lavender) for disease and pests, thinning the shoots and fruit early in the season, regularly testing the grapes approaching harvest, performing regular chemical tests on our wine, adjusting the SO2 level, topping the barrels, then adding inert gas, all the while planning yeast choices for harvest, calculating harvest estimates and ordering barrels for the wine, bottles, labels, and corks for the oil and the wine. With all those lesso...

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...