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Albania is a country on the Mediterranean nestled between Italy and Greece, yet is definitively not Italy nor Greece. While Greece and Italy are overwhelmingly celebrated for their food cultures, Albania has been in the shadow of our modern culture until many years after the fall of a harsh communist dictatorship in the 1990s. However, the olive tree and its fruits and oils have been revered here since antiquity. It is a highly sacred plant, with deep cultural and spiritual roots in the nation’s mind. Skanderberg, Albania’s defacto hero, in the 1400s required that all married couples plant two olive trees, as a symbol of hope and longevity. There are currently 1.8 million olive trees in Albania, a country smaller than Kentucky, and some trees are known to be over 1000 years old. Albania has the perfect recipe for olive tree growing: rugged mountains alongside the Mediterranean Sea with well-drained soils, scorching dry summers, and gentle rainy winters. Wild olives have been present in Albania for more than 12,000 years.
Albania is synonymous to small batch. Greece has large manufacturers with huge factories producing olive oil from big swaths of land, and Italy has been in the news countless times for their olive oil mafias, mixing oils, and even better for buying oil from outside countries (often Albania!) and selling it as Italian. The reality in Albania is that although the cultivation of olive trees has been an essential part of Albanian life, production has never been able to grow to a corporate scale. During the privatization of farmland in the 1990s, 45,000 hectares of olive groves were distributed to 110,000 households, resulting in a highly disconnected olive production. Today, 80% of farms are smaller than 2 hectares. In Vuno, as in the rest of Albania, the groves we work are extremely fragmented. One family owns these 20 trees, and another family owns the 30 beside them. Another problem is the lack of workers. If you don’t have anybody to harvest your trees, you cannot harvest that many each day. Olives must be pressed the same day they are picked as they are highly perishable fruits. While this reality adds to the overall difficulty of producing olive oil in Albania, it also means that the olive oil that is produced is of an extremely small batched nature. For our Vuno olive oil batches, we averaged at 22 trees per batch.
