In celebration of their eightieth birthday, Valvona & Crolla, Edinburgh’s great Italian foodshop and restaurant, are selling La Palombara, which may sound like something from their sumptuous wine list but is in fact an estate bottled extra virgin olive oil from central Italy made by Cesidio di Ciacca, brother of Mary Contini, one of the Edinburgh firm’s proprietors, on his estate in the Val di Comino. Costing £9.99 for a quarter-litre bottle, this is an oil that cannot conceal that it belongs in Italian olive oil’s highest bracket, but it’s clearly an oil of the highest intensity, well worth sampling, as is suggested, on salads and charcoal-grilled fish.
Whether it can rival Poggio Lamentano, which has always been my favourite Valvona & Crolla oil, remains to be seen. Made by the Zyw family, former residents of the Dean Village in Edinburgh, where Aleksander, the father, was a distinguished Polish artist and a close friend of my own father, this distinguished Italian oil has always caught the eye, thanks to the simple but subtle greenness of its label.
But it’s the flavour that counts, of course. Though Aleksander moved to Castagneto Carducci on theTuscan coast for health reasons, and developed his style in new directions, olive oil soon became a family speciality, produced in sloping olive groves above the sea, where I twice had the good fortune to spend a weekend. The 2013 vintage costs £24.75 for a standard-sized bottle - again not cheap, but a star oil for a star occasion.
Also on Valvona & Crolla’s latest list, and similarly enticing, is a Frantoio Galantino oil which comes in a half-litre ceramic flask costing £19.95, strikingly designed with an attractive olive motif.
Correction: the opening concert of the Edinburgh Festival takes place this year on Friday, August 8, not on August 7 as stated in a previous blog.
0 July 2014
Whether it can rival Poggio Lamentano, which has always been my favourite Valvona & Crolla oil, remains to be seen. Made by the Zyw family, former residents of the Dean Village in Edinburgh, where Aleksander, the father, was a distinguished Polish artist and a close friend of my own father, this distinguished Italian oil has always caught the eye, thanks to the simple but subtle greenness of its label.
But it’s the flavour that counts, of course. Though Aleksander moved to Castagneto Carducci on theTuscan coast for health reasons, and developed his style in new directions, olive oil soon became a family speciality, produced in sloping olive groves above the sea, where I twice had the good fortune to spend a weekend. The 2013 vintage costs £24.75 for a standard-sized bottle - again not cheap, but a star oil for a star occasion.
Also on Valvona & Crolla’s latest list, and similarly enticing, is a Frantoio Galantino oil which comes in a half-litre ceramic flask costing £19.95, strikingly designed with an attractive olive motif.
Correction: the opening concert of the Edinburgh Festival takes place this year on Friday, August 8, not on August 7 as stated in a previous blog.
0 July 2014
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