Thursday, August 31, 2006

Almazaras

As promised, yesterday I joined Christian on two visits to olive oil cooperatives in Catalonia, the so called Almazaras. It was cool to see the “selling business” live and discover how important the Catalan language is if you want to make business in this autonomous community. Since I was introduced as the “Danish colleague from marketing”, the manager of the first plant we visited switched to Spanish, which didn’t help me in 100% – he was still talking very quickly. The second plant was, in contrast, purely Catalan, thus I sat and pretended to understand pretty much every word being said. This was in Tarragona, a province growing tons of hazelnuts (guess that’s where one of Cloetta’s oldest chocolates got its name). We were recommended a restaurant just next to the cooperative, which showed to be superb in ambience, quality and service, billing just a few Euros. You would never expect such a restaurant to exist in this kind of an outback.




Wine fields of Catalonia









Transporting olives



Manufacturing special brand of oil: one person doing it all







Everywhere in Tarragona you see hazelnut trees






The business doesn't stop because of lunch






Cheers Christian!





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