Renzo Baldaccini was not born a farmer. A past as a hotelier and then, at a certain point in life, a sudden but definitive decision.
He restored the old farmhouse inherited from his father, which was, in its time, the farm of the nearby Villa Mansi, one of the many properties of this famous family of merchants of the precious Lucca silks in the 1700s.
Renzo Baldaccini’s is, first and foremost, a passion. The passion for oil that led him to choose to take the difficult and demanding path of the PDO product.
“Producing PDO oil,” says Renzo, “does not only mean creating a product of the highest quality that respects standards of excellence, but also being constantly up to date from a technical and regulatory point of view and subjected to continuous controls, from quality checks to those of the health authorities and the labour inspectorate.
Then, obviously, there are all those precautions that make a given oil worthy of being classified as ‘PDO’: “First of all, the time that passes from harvest to pressing is fundamental. It must be as short as possible. We harvest and press on the same day, and this means that the olives are at most a few hours old and the fragrance remains intact.”
Another decisive factor is the quality of the mill, which must carry out the operations at low temperatures so as not to ruin the fragrance; and even more demanding is the ‘after’: “To enhance the oil, bottling is fundamental,” explains Baldaccini. “The oil must in fact be stored in rooms at a constant temperature of 17 degrees, in containers that extract the oxygen and inject nitrogen, so as not to age the oil prematurely, and obviously it must not be exposed to light.” In short, there are many factors that make an oil ‘PDO’ and require a constant commitment on the part of those who produce it: “A commitment that is also a pleasure,” concludes Baldaccini, “precisely for the result of obtaining an oil whose quality is recognised.”
But Renzo Baldaccini’s agriturismo is on one of the most beautiful hills of the Lucchesia, in the Morianese, an area known precisely for its high-quality fruit and vegetable production, where products can also be bought on the farm, directly from field to table.
And for this commitment of his, Renzo Baldaccini, as part of the ExtraLucca event, received the “Corona” (Crown), a prestigious recognition of his oil and his story.