Why Bidni

When my grandfather Toma planted this grove in 1962, he didn't pick Bidni because it was fashionable. He picked it because it was the only cultivar that survived two summers without water in 1956.

Bidni is the indigenous Maltese olive. Pre-WWII it was on most farms in the islands; by 1990 it was nearly gone, replaced by faster-fruiting Italian and Spanish cultivars. The fruit is small, the yield is low, and the harvest window is narrow — three weeks at the most. It is, by every modern commercial metric, a bad olive.

The flavour, though, is unlike anything else. Picked early, it's green tomato leaf and white pepper. Picked late, it's ripe almond and a hint of marzipan that you don't find in any Tuscan oil. It carries a mineral edge from Malta's limestone that the Tuscan Frantoio simply doesn't have access to.

We have 318 Bidni trees. Two more rows are Carolea, planted in 1970 by my grandfather as an experiment — those go into the Riserva. Everything else is Bidni. We don't plan to change that.

The Bidni Foundation in Sannat (Gozo) is the reason this cultivar still exists. They've preserved cuttings, mapped surviving groves, and run a propagation programme since 2008. If you care about indigenous food crops, donate to them, not us.