Menteşe SOM Zeytinyağı

The mill, told properly

Menteşe SOM is the olive oil of Ali Osman Menteşe, at Ağaçlıhöyük village in Milas, Muğla, on the Milas–Bodrum road. A report reproduced on the producer's site records that Menteşe, an economist who had spent years as a senior manager for pharmaceutical companies, retired in 1998, settled in Milas, which he gives as his home town, and began working the olive groves he had inherited at Ağaçlıhöyük. The same report has him saying that when he arrived many people in the district held that no cooking oil could come out of Milas oil, and that he built a boutique pressing plant to prove that any district's oil could be good if it was grown and made well. He pressed the greater part of his Memecik at TARİŞ plants and part of it in his own workshop, and gives the inherited holding as more than 2,000 trees, to which he added 1,200.

The names on the bottles come from the family. The same report records that Menteşe's grandfather, Murat Salih Menteşe, fled Abdülhamid II for Paris and married Suzanne Dugeny, who was French, there in 1908, and that the couple's centenary gave the 'Suzan Nine' label its name; SOM is made from the initials of the family's names, and Menteşe works with his wife Sitare Menteşe in Milas. The site's masthead reads 'SIZMA ZEYTİN YAĞI • MENTEŞE ÇİFTLİĞİ • 1909 YILINDAN BU YANA' — since 1909 — a date no opened page explains and one the site's own account of the operation, which begins in 1998, does not carry.

An account of a visit published on the site by Nilüfer Gündüz and Vildan Karsan in January 2005 describes the farm as it then stood: a mound on the flat plain just before the airport, signposted in small lettering from the Milas–Bodrum road; a small-capacity Italian cold-pressing machine, an 'Olio Mio', which the visitors watched running with its operator; olives taken by machine, kept off the ground, brought in in crates and washed in changing water; and Olio Mylasa pressed from alaca, or turning, fruit at an acidity the account gives as 0.3 to 0.5 per cent. The homepage states that olives from the groves are pressed within twelve hours at the latest and that the oil is made in limited quantity.

Menteşe argued in public for the designation that now covers his district. A report on the site of a workshop hosted by the Milas Chamber of Commerce and Industry has him telling the room that Milas oil from Memecik olives had to be brought under geographical-indication protection with its acidity, peroxide and phenol values written into the specification, and adding that Ayvalık had done this and Milas had to do it too. Milas Zeytinyağı was registered as a Turkish menşe adı under number 201 on 6 December 2016 at the application of that same chamber, and entered in the European Union register by Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) 2020/2194 of 16 December 2020; a later report on the producer's site records that the first EU geographical-indication certificate issued by the chamber, with the holograms for the bottles, went to Menteşe under the Menteşe Som brand from the hands of the chamber's chairman Reşit Özer, and that Menteşe had entered Flos Olei's annual selection of the world's 500 best olive oils ten times in eleven years. The site's own awards gallery lists Flos Olei catalogues from 2010 to 2025, the Italian guide L'Extravergine for 2007 and 2008, a Terra Olivo section for Jerusalem, an ITQI award ceremony in Brussels in 2012, and a Monde Selection ceremony in Venice.

From the public record: mentesesomzeytinyagi.com · ci.turkpatent.gov.tr · eur-lex.europa.eu