DAVID and Michele Sheward of Paradox Olive Grove scooped the pool at the 2016 Australian Olive Association National Extra Virgin Olive Oil Competition, held earlier this month.
The grove won Gold, Best of State, Champion in Class (Mild) and Best of Show in their first time entering the competition.
Michele, whose background is in accountancy, said she has always loved olive trees and in 2006 came across a course that was available online as a Certificate 3 in Horticulture and olive production through NMIT.
“I did that as a precursor to learn about olives and we began to look for a property. A couple of years later we found a place at Kanumbra which is about an hour north-east of Yarra Glen in Victoria between Yea and Mansfield,” she said.
“Overall it is 40 hectares and we have 4.7ha planted to the olives with about 1600 trees plus we also have some sheep on it eating down the grass.
We were originally thinking about planting 3000 trees as up until about eighteen months ago we were only coming up here at the weekends so we were limited and a lot of the work we get done is only at weekends - actually my husband is still working full time.”
The grove of 1600 trees was planted in 2011 and is made up of three varieties- Picual, Hojiblanca and Koroneiki – with the couple committed to meeting Australian olive oil production standards.
Michele likens the flavours in the varieties with the Picual having hints of tomato and passionfruit; Hojiblanca showing hints of artichoke; and walnut and the Koroneiki hints of apple and dried mint.
She adds that as the trees are still young and not yet in full production the fruit is hand-harvested as they wouldn’t stand up to machine harvesting.
“The trees are growing well but you can’t expect perfection as something always pops up and you are in the hands of nature,” Michelle said.
“Once the trees mature and reach full production we’re not sure if we’ll also do some table olives - that’s something we’ll consider as we will need to diversify.
“At present, because of the small quantities we are blending the varieties together into one oil with the processing being done at Kialla.
“We were thrilled to win the awards and now everything is taking off a lot quicker that we thought.
“Currently we are supplying outlets such as produce stores in our local region and we’ve also had some interest from others now we’ve won the awards so we’ll look at our strategy as things develop.”
