More South African wine estates are getting into bed with the olive oil business. At Winex in October this year the wine estates with an array of olives and olive oils on offer seemed to have attracted more people to their stand instead of those who just showcased their latest wines.
Talking to a few owners of wine estates who now also dabble in the olive business it seems that the tendency is that more farmers are planning on planting olive trees on hectares of land that have been cultivated for their grape vines.
Melissa Naudé, sales and marketing administrator at Wildekrans Wine Estate said that due to the rising input costs of winemaking and the strained profit margins threatening the industry’s sustainability, they had to look into producing something else to attract people yet again to their wines.
‘We realised that we couldn’t just be one dimensional and we started to manufacture and sell honey (about 40 litres per year) and this year we also planted pecan nuts and olives because we believe that it would be a worthy investments in the future. I say why not diversify your business when you have enough space to do so,’ said Naudé.
While some wine farmers are branching out into the olive business to expand their profit margin, some farmers are actually doing it to create more jobs for their farm workers. Annalene du Toit the wife of the renowned winemaker, Pieter du Toit, at the Kloovenburg Estate in Riebeek Kasteel, said that her family planted their first olives more than 22 years ago because they believed that diversification was important in order to keep the farm busy when the grape season was over.
‘The wine is great, but the olives keep things very interesting on the farm because we can employ more workers from the community and at Kloovenburg we do everything ourselves, including the packaging and even the labels,’ she said. Annalene started selling a range of bottled olives from their farm house and she has since made a name for herself for her quality olive oil after acquiring an olive press in 2000. She sells bottled olives, tapenade and several other olive-related products.
She is now expanding the non-culinary uses of olive oil into the area of beauty products and the olives are now being used to produce a variety of products other than salad and cooking oil, such as soap, jam, snacks and bread spreads.
Annalene is also the director of the South African Olive Industry Association and she said that they are currently busy with extensive research to regulate the imports and exports of olive oil and particularly the labelling of imports to SA. Food Review will be looking at this marriage between wine and olives in more depth in the January edition.
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