Gramado sells chocolate with efficiency. You enter the city and within ten minutes you already know three factories, two fondue shops, and an entire street dedicated to transformed cacao. It’s a city that found its product and explored it to the limit.
But there’s another Gramado — that of the serra gaúcha that produces olive oil with European methods, grapes with European methods, and that recently began to see itself as a region that produces something beyond alpine tourism.
As Olivas de Gramado are part of this other story.
Seven olive oils arrive for tasting in small cups made from cut bottle bottoms — this improvised design object that simultaneously recycles glass and creates a completely new functional object. On a board with a fire-branded mark, the small cups are aligned from mildest to most intense. Alongside, cheeses, cured meats, dark chocolate, and bread.
The tasting sequence has logic: you begin with the most delicate, where the green fruitiness is gentle and the bitterness almost imperceptible. You advance to the more robust oils, where the pepper appears at the back of the throat — that spiciness that Italians call retrogosto and that is a sign of polyphenols, of health, of olive trees that suffered a little to produce something with character.
Tasting olive oil as one tastes wine is not affectation. It’s the only way to understand what you’re buying.
The dark chocolate between one oil and another functions as a reset — more efficient than water, because the bitterness of cacao converses with the bitterness of olive and, paradoxically, cleanses the palate with more delicacy.
Gramado doesn’t need to choose between chocolate and olive oil. It can be both things. This tasting proves it.
Technical Information
- Location: Olivas de Gramado, Gramado, RS
- Category: Terroir / Olive Oils
- Average Price: R$ 60–100 per person (tasting + products)
- Rating: ⭐ (5/5) — guided tasting of gaúcho olive oil with creative presentation and sensory rigor