Making good things happen
There’s an old saying that if you want something done, ask a busy person. It could have been meant for Charles and Kay Chinnaiyah. By Susan McLeary. Photo by Lucia Zanmonti.
The couple’s Olea Estate Picual olive oil won Reserve Best in Show, plus Best in its category, at the 2019 Olive Oil EVOO Awards, and a Gold medal at the Royal Easter Show Olive Oil Awards 2019. Royal Show judges awarded Olea Estate Frantoio Class Champion (Delicate category).
Arriving in New Zealand from Sri Lanka in 1981, in 1984 Charles and Kay set up Sysware Group, an IT business specialising in business intelligence consulting. Working in Wellington and living on their olive grove outside Featherston, they believe in being positive, hands-on, working hard and taking opportunities.
Visiting Martinborough in 1999 and idly looking in a real estate agency window, Charles’s philosophy of being nice not grumpy with people (“the way you feel depends on how the first person you meet that day treats you”) encouraged an agent to show them around, including the newly-established Martinborough Olive Grove.
They fell in love with olive trees, and the germ of an idea was hatched. Charles wanted a property with water, and when soil tests showed land in Boundary Road, Featherston, included ancient riverbed stones from an earlier course of the Tauherenikau River, he was sold.
“We just felt there was something nice about the place,” they say.
Knowing nothing about olive growing or olive oil, he attended an Olives NZ conference in Nelson, admiring how passionate the growers were about their trees. Despite being the first member without trees, Charles volunteered to be Treasurer for Olives New Zealand and learn everything he could about the fledgling industry.
Planting started in 2000, the first olive grove in the area. “We started late in the season, so the plant suppliers basically sold us everything they hadn’t sold. We planted 12 varieties and whittled them down to four – Frantoio, Picual, Pendolino and Leccino – which all flourish here.
Kay adds that despite not being a gardener, she planted the trees herself with weekend help from their two high school children.
There were some setbacks with frost damaging the trees, and when one year they had to dump their precious crop as mulch because local processing facilities were unavailable, Charles’s attitude came to the fore.
“If you want to control your future, make one!” he declared, and imported a mid-sized olive press.
He and Kay now press for many small regional growers, providing a valuable resource at a massively busy time. Olives must be processed promptly after picking to maintain quality.
While many small growers still pick their olives traditionally by hand, often with family and friends, increasingly growers are turning to mechanical harvesting.
It’s quicker – roughly a harvester does in a day what takes a week to hand-pick – and as olives are a winter crop the weather can be un-cooperative.
A shortage of mechanical harvesters puts pressure on picking and processing, so (inevitably) Charles came up with a solution. He imported a harvester from Australia, and with help from the local Johnson brothers modified it to handle larger trees.
It’s not like most tree-shakers; to be honest, it looks like a carwash. As the harvester is driven down a row of trees, vertical threshers on each side whirl through the trees and drop the fruit into waiting bins. Ingenious.
Charles and Kay choose not to blend their EVOO, preferring to “taste the oil as nature intended – an expression of time and place”.
They also don’t infuse their oils, saying “we’ve got a Rolls Royce product, why paint racing stripes on it and spoil a good thing?”
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