Huile d'olive de Nyons

Appearance & taste

The oil is yellow with a green sheen to golden yellow. It smells of green apples and dried fruit and tastes buttery, sometimes with hints of fresh hazelnuts or freshly cut grass. It is creamy; in contrast to “fluid” oils, the tasters call it “fat”. Bitterness and pungency are weak and reach at most a score of 2 on the ten-point scale of the International Olive Council.

The free acidity is at most 0.8 g per 100 g of oil. An oleic acid content of over 80 % is typical of the Tanche variety. The label shows the name together with “Appellation d’origine protégée” or “AOP” in the same field of vision and carries the EU PDO symbol.

Production

At least 95 % of the olives come from the Tanche variety, the rest from trees planted for pollination. Tanche is grown both as a table olive and for oil. After the harvest, the olives are traditionally sorted by size, and the small ones go to the oil mills.

The olives are harvested at the right, advanced stage of ripeness and milled shortly afterwards. During pressing and extraction of the oil, the paste reaches at most 27 °C, and nothing apart from water is added. All steps from growing the olives to processing them into oil take place in the area.

Origin & history

The area lies on the 44th parallel, north of Mont Ventoux, east of the Rhône valley and south of foothills of the Alps 1,000 to 1,300 m high, which slow down the mistral. Mont Ventoux keeps off heavy rain from the south, which is why the area is called the “dry Pre-Alps”. Summers are hot and dry, and the cold arrives gradually in winter. Because of around 2,500 hours of sunshine a year and mild temperatures, Nyons is also called “little Nice”. The olives grow on gentle, south-facing slopes with deep, permeable scree soils.

Tanche is a native, relatively frost-hardy variety of the Nyons basin and the Baronnies and is hardly grown elsewhere. It needs the winter cold to make yields more even and is sensitive to wind. According to the specification, some trees are around 1,000 years old. According to the specification, the Phoenicians and later the Greeks already taught the people on the river Eygues to grow olives. After difficult years in the 20th century, above all after the frost of 1956, the producers joined forces and founded the “Confrérie des chevaliers de l’olivier” in 1964. In 1968 the court in Valence recognised the designation of origin, followed in 1994 by the controlled designation of origin; according to the specification, it was the first olive oil in France with this recognition.