All of this took place recently on the esplanada of one of my favourite local cafés – Típico da Serra, known also in national folklore as O Rei do Bacalhau – not just because they serve wonderful food (from a cheeky bifana while I’m out walking the dog, through to full-on Portuguese family dining), but because they seemed happy to host an impromptu olive oil tasting carried out by three unlikely-looking men, dangerously after closing time.
Assembled unusually and at short notice were Dr. Fabio Fernandez of the Straight Law Office (more about that on another occasion), aviation-expert-turned-olive-oil-farmer-and-miller Haim Merkado, and me who, having downed that first tablespoon of olive oil, lost my voice.
Weeks earlier, I attempted an online interview with Haim about his fascinating background in aviation and his relatively new adventure in olive oil production. The interview was dogged by technical issues, as one might anticipate connecting with deepest, darkest Alentejo, but nonetheless lasted well over an hour thanks to Haim’s anecdotal skills and riveting life story.
My breath was taken away, unexpectedly, when he asked to meet in person as he was passing near my town, and choking soon into the roadside tasting, this was not a bad food experience in the sense of a vintage prawn or silly-hot chilli. This was what happens after a lifetime of innocently consumed, poor quality oil, that I imagined was the signature of all olive oils – easy-going and nice to cook with, or in a salad dressing.
Olive Oil postacard final – 7
And when I say “lifetime”, I mean “half lifetime” because, as an Englishman, I only experienced olive oil in the 1980s and even then it was still sold in chemists as a medicine, as it began to show up on UK supermarket shelves.
Eyes closed for the big moment – trying Haim’s early harvest first press – the peppery assault on the back of my throat got me reaching, involuntarily and with some dignity lost, for a beer, as you can hear in the resulting audio. Begging for “mais um!” and my mummy, the miller was in no way surprised, knowing that this first pressing piquancy was the first step in my oily education.
He looked on with the patient demeanour and occasional giggle of someone who has seen this many times before. He had, as it turned out, witnessed exactly this reaction from a great many people who believed – as I did – that olive oil was a gentle, inoffensive thing that one drizzled and moved on from. He was not unsympathetic but was entirely unsurprised.
Stilled, and brought into the marvellous moment by the olive-oriented ordeal, I began – once settled – to realise a great depth and diversity of flavour and a most wonderful glow from the oil in front of me and in the videos that Haim showed me captured on his farm in the Alentejo hills near Colos, where 300 ancient Galega olive trees grow on land that until recently nobody much wanted.
The Merkado Olive ‘retreat’ is not, it should be said immediately, a typical olive oil operation or tourist destination. Its founder is an aerobatic pilot, a man who spent years making aircraft do things that most passengers prefer not to think about, where split-second decisions and absolute technical discipline were not optional extras but the literal difference between life and … the other thing.
Haim Merkado
When he traded the flight deck for the Alentejo, he brought the same mentality with him. The result is an olive oil business run with what its website calls “aviation-grade precision”. And this isn’t just great marketing. The process I was shown, and have learned about from the website, and Senhor Merkado’s engaging presence, is genuinely extraordinary.
Cleaned olives are placed into specialised bags, each given a unique ID tracking number, weighed and logged. They are submerged for precisely 20 minutes in a flowing 23°C water bath – not 22, not 24 – designed to flush out pests and impurities. The mill runs at a temperature strictly between 22°C and 27°C. This matters enormously, and the reason it matters is the first thing I learned that afternoon.
There are five grades of olive oil. Most people know two: extra virgin and everything else. What I did not know – what most blissfully ignorant consumers do not know – is that at 27 degrees Celsius, a chemical breakdown occurs within the olive that destroys the polyphenols: the active compounds that give real olive oil its peppery kick, its health benefits, its medicinal properties, its entire reason for being something other than a cooking fat.
The choking sensation that felt like it was finishing me was not a defect. It was proof of life. The industrial alternative – what fills most supermarket shelves, including much of what calls itself extra virgin olive oil – is extracted chemically, at temperatures of 30 degrees and above, from the pulp that remains after the first pressing. The polyphenols are gone. The kick is gone. What remains is standardised, stable, consistent, and almost entirely pointless from a health perspective.
As my host put it, with the weary authority of a man who has spent years challenging corrupt orthodoxy: the moment you understand the industry, the wool-pulling becomes mind-numbing. Let’s not even talk about the liberally applied pesticides that underpin the business model of the mass-produced oils most of us habitually consume.
Haim and Sue, his life and business partner, are clearly engaged in a passionate labour of love. The Galega olive is notoriously unpredictable. Generous one year, completely absent the next. It fiercely resists mechanical harvesting. It demands a relationship rather than a factory line. It is also, the record suggests, approximately 3,000 years old.
Merkado Olive Oil
The Romans knew about it. Industrial agriculture largely decided it was too inconvenient to bother with. The trees at Merkado were abandoned for years, choked by undergrowth, until someone with a pilot’s eye for what is salvageable decided they were worth four years of clearance, pruning and restorative care.
In our brief time together, I tried Merkado ‘mid-season’ too, a gentler experience, though no less extraordinary. Blessed with a greenness, a freshness, something between cucumber, melon and cut grass. Where the early-season oil had come at me like a small, controlled explosion, this one took its time.
Haim’s metaphor: like the difference between vodka and a good malt whisky. One gives you fireworks and dies. The other takes you on a journey, tells you stories, moves through chocolate and orange and cherry and lets you feel the whole thing.
Again, and not for the first time in Portugal, another notable case of concealing the most extraordinary things in plain sight. Three hundred ancient trees on a hill near a village most people have never heard of, producing around 1,000 litres of oil per year, run with the obsessive discipline of someone who used to trust his life to precision instruments. And a medicine disguised as a kitchen ingredient.
You can visit them in Colos. You can book a farm visit, pull up a stool at the tasting bar, and discover what olive oil actually tastes like when nobody has removed all the interesting and arguably useful parts. You can bring your own olives and use their mill. You can join the Olive Club if you want regular access to what they produce.
This, like so many independent and passion-driven projects in Portugal, must be supported – before all we know are supermarkets offering lifeless convenience and museums where working farms once existed.
Merkado Olive Retreat, Colos, Alentejo – merkadoolive.eu
Hear the interview here – portugaltalkradio.com
Read Carl Munson’s previous article: What would Zé say?
Dining and Cooking