Yellingbo Gold Ltd - Australia - 500ml

500 ml Bottle - Victoria, Australia

Limited edition. Pressed June 2007 - (most recent press) ChefShop.com is donating 5% of all Yellingbo revenues to the Jasmine Foundation for orphaned children. See below for details.

Made in Australia by father-and-son team Howard and Jeremy Meltzer, Yellingbo is beautiful golden-green extra-virgin oil, a blend of four single estate-grown olive varietals. Its fragrant aroma offers mellow hints of sun-ripened fruit, and the palate is buttery-smooth, finishing with a subtle touch of pepper. And since it's from the southern hemisphere, where olives typically ripen April-June, this is the brand-new, just-bottled harvest!

Yellingbo Gold limited edition is a carefully crafted blend of Manzanillo, Leccino, Picual and Corregiola olives. Every olive is hand-picked, and the oil is pressed in just four hours at a press only 100 meters from the groves. (Industry-wide, pressing within 24 hours of picking is considered good.)



About the Jasmine Foundation:

Not only do we love Yellingbo on everything from crusty bread to ripe tomatoes, but it's also supporting a good cause. Five percent of profits from Yellingbo sales go to the Jasmine Foundation to support children orphaned in the 2004 tsunami in Southeast Asia. Jeremy is a director of this foundation - read more.



About the Producers:

One day, Howard Meltzer, an attorney by trade, was out at his family's farm in the little valley of Yellingbo in Victoria, Australia, about an hour outside of Melbourne.

His son and partner, Jeremy, grinned as he told us this story.

"We pretty much left him home one weekend, and well, we got back and he'd planted about 3,000 trees," said Jeremy.

At the time, many folks in that part of Australia were taking advantage of the region's Mediterranean-like climate by planting grape vines for wine. Meltzer decided to try olive groves.

After several years, the trees were ready for their first harvest, and Jeremy and his dad jumped wholeheartedly into their new enterprise. Then, as now, it's pretty much just the two of them - and 3,000 olive trees.

That means that Howard and Jeremy both spend a lot of their time planting, pruning and caring for the trees by themselves. They talk to experts, read a great deal, and they've learned enormously in the process. They use natural products like manure, not chemical fertilizers or pesticides. ("Believe me, I can attest to that!" said Jeremy.) We love knowing exactly where our oil comes from, especially after the New Yorker's recent article about olive-oil fraud...crazy stuff.

Howard has always enjoyed working with his hands and he's loving the farming life, said his son, while the marketing side of the business falls more to him. Before Yellingbo became full-time, Jeremy lived in Miami for three years, where he was sang romantic Latin jazz . . . in Spanish.

At harvest-time, Jeremy and Howard "bribe a lot of family friends" with fresh-pressed oil, said Jeremy. With everyone helping out in the groves and picking together, the occasion feels like a party - and culminates in a real feast: a dinner of spit-roasted lamb under the olive trees.

This 2007 harvest marks the Meltzers' third year selling their oil; production has doubled since the first year. The name Yellingbo is aboriginal, and the label on the slim, dark bottles - available also in a giftable 250-ml size - depicts a bright-colored bird in traditional dot painting style. The unusual bird is the Helmeted Honeyeater, a native endangered species that has found a sometime home in the Meltzers' olive groves.