For almost 14 years now, my wife and daughter and I have pursued the folly of tending nearly 200 olive trees for the sole purpose of extracting the fruit's precious "Extra Virgin Olive Oil". We invite you to buy a bottle and tell us what you think.
Tips For Maximize Enjoyment
Remember single-origin, small batch oils like our are too valuable to cook with! Craft oil loses its nuanced aromas and flavors when introduced to high heat.
Instead, use it as a finishing oil at the table - drizzled on top of fresh-from-the-oven pizza, seafood, vegetable or soups - or as part of your favorite house-made dressing. One of my favorite ways to enjoy this oil is as a dipping sauce for really good fresh bread, sprinkled with a few grains of coarse sea salt!
Tasting Technique
To fully appreciate what an oil has to offer - place a generous teaspoon on your tongue, coat your mouth with it and then draw in some air over the sides of your coated tongue. You'll be amazed by the subtleties you'll swear weren't there before!
Why A Vintage Oil?
Like fine wine, olive oil shows differently with each vintage year, depending on such things as rain, yield, pests, heat, wind, and irrigation
(or not, as the case may be). So we put a vintage year on each label, accompanied by our daughter's artwork. This is largely what separates craft oil from the bulk oils available in the store. And a vintage craft oil is, by definition, almost exclusively available from the grower.
Also, as olive oil ages, its aromas and flavors change dramatically. When first pressed ("Olio Nuovo") offers strong hints of hay and has a bitterness in the back of the throat after swallowing a spoonful. While this may sound off-putting, this acquired taste is an indicator of the healthiest phase of the oil, when it's high in the poly-phenols that help lower cholesterol.
As the oil ages, it gets softer, rounder and richer, until after about five or six years when the oxidation that has softened the oil goes too far and the oil smells rancid. Our oils generally reach this stage after five to even ten years, with one unpleasant exception (which we dumped, crying all the time).
