Olivegrower profile – 2020 AIOA Best of Show
Salt-laden winds are balanced by a good climate and rainfall in the coastal Flinders Island grove.
Flinders Island Olives: winds, wombats, wallabies and AIOA Best A change is as good as a holiday, they say, and while turning vacation land into an olive grove wasn’t quite as relaxing, for Flinders Island Olives owner Jude Cazaly it’s been similarly rewarding. And in 2020, the process has provided her with the olivegrowing equivalent of the ‘trip of a lifetime’. Flinders Island Olives’ Organic EVOO was named Best Extra Virgin Olive Oil of Show Boutique Volume at the 2020 Australian International Olive Awards, sending the industry’s highest accolade home to the tiny Bass Strait island. Earning a judges’ score of 91.5, the winning oil also took Gold and the trophies for Reserve Champion Medium EVOO and Champion Tasmanian EVOO. The company’s Season’s Blend EVOO added another Gold medal for the 1100-tree producer, which is the only commercial grove on Flinders Island. Jude said she was “bowled over” by the win, particularly in what she describes as “a very different year”. “We nearly didn’t pick this year,” she said. “We had a group of WWOOFers set to come and pick but then COVID set in. Flinders Island was in lockdown within Tasmania, so obviously that couldn’t happen,” she said. “But then a couple of my friends said ‘We need to do something; we can’t travel off the island’, so we all did it. There was a mixture of friends, neighbours and acquaintances, and I hired some other people I didn’t know. We were picking under COVID distancing
rules, we washed our hands a lot, did all the right things. “I lay a good lunch on each day and we usually have a big nosh up at the end but I’m aiming for a really big celebration now, once everything opens up again.”
“It was the slower ripening time that just seemed to develop the flavour.” Background
Cazaly said she planted her grove “because I had the land”, having spent holidays on Flinders Island with friends for 40 years. Contemplating what she’d do if she moved there permanently, she juggled various niche industries and personal considerations, and olives won out. “I had to think about the type of place it was, about my abilities, and how I wanted to manage the earth and the operation,” she said. “I couldn’t do animals, I would have just named them all and kept them, and olives were just starting to have a little re-emergence. I checked it all out and they seemed the perfect fit for both Flinders Island and what I could learn to do.”
With her friend and business partner Mary-Anne, Jude planted the grove in 2002. Following advice from Andrew Burgess of Modern Olives, they planted at 4x7 spacing and chose Leccino and Frantoio as the main varietals, along with four others as pollinators and 10 Kalamata trees for table fruit. “We finished on October 28 and the westerlies – aka the roaring forties - blew for five weeks. The trees were saying ‘what have you done to us?’ but we had no horticultural background so we were learning as we went,” Jude said. “We put in 1000 trees but I wanted to plant more. It was suggested we put in the first 1000 and see how we go. That was a good idea in retrospect.”
Issue 118 • December 2020 • Australian & New Zealand Olivegrower & Processor • 17
