We invite you to buy a bottle and tell us what you think.
This was our best vintage in a decade, producing almost a full 1000 pounds of fruit - enough for 23 gallons of oil. Harvest started the day after Thanksgiving and was completed on Sunday morning - not because we'd emptied the trees, but because we and our volunteer crew had to get back to work on Monday!
Tips To Maximize Enjoyment
Remember single-origin, small batch oils like Olio d'Coleo are too light and nuanced (and 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, roasted/grilled vegetables, 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 - make a wide grin and suck in air through the sides. 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, depending on such things as rain, yield, pests, heat, wind, length of season, number of days of sun, and irrigation (or not, as the case may be). So each bottle of Olio d'Coleo has a vintage year on each label, accompanied by our daughter's artwork. This single vintage is part of what separates craft oil from the bulk oils available in the store, as there are no restrictions on blending oils from different vintages - a practice we don't use. And a vintage craft oil is, by definition, almost exclusively available from the grower.
Use It, Don't Keep It!
As olive oil ages its aromas and flavors change dramatically. When first pressed ("Olio Nuovo") Olio d'Coleo offers strong hints of fresh-cut hay and has an almond-like bitterness in the back of the throat after swallowing a spoonful - an indicator the oil is in the healthiest phase of its life, before its poly-phenols have begun their inevitable decline over time - and it's this natural chemical that lowers your cholesterol.
As the oil ages, it gets softer, rounder and richer, until after 4-6 years the oxidation goes too far and the oil begins to get rancid. Our oils generally reach this stage after 5-10 years, with one unpleasant exception (which we dumped, crying all the time).
