How it’s made
From the tree to the bottle, without shortcuts.
Good olive oil is not made by doing something clever. It is made by refusing to do the several things that would be cheaper.
Extra virgin is a legal grade, not a marketing word. To qualify, oil has to be extracted mechanically, stay below a defined free fatty acid level, and pass a taste panel with no detectable defects. Plenty of oil on Australian shelves is sold as extra virgin and would not pass that test by the time it reaches you, because the grade is measured at production and the oil then spends months or years getting to the shelf.
Here is what actually happens to ours, in order.
Tending the trees
Olives are a year-round job even though harvest is a few weeks. Trees are pruned in late winter to open the canopy so light reaches the fruit. The grove is managed for a moderate crop rather than the largest possible one, because trees pushed hard produce fruit with less oil and less character.
Picking, by hand
Harvest runs through autumn, usually from April into June depending on the season. The fruit is picked by hand when it turns from green to purple, at the point where oil yield and flavour meet. Picking by hand means the fruit is not bruised the way mechanical shaking bruises it, and damaged fruit is left behind rather than going in the bin.
Crushed within 24 hours
This is the step that matters most and the one most producers cannot do. The press is on the property, so fruit picked in the morning is generally crushed the same afternoon, and never later than the next day. Olives start fermenting the moment they are off the tree. Every hour between picking and crushing raises the free fatty acid level, which is the single measurement that separates extra virgin from everything below it.
Malaxation, kept cold
The crushed paste is slowly stirred so the microscopic oil droplets can join into larger ones that can actually be separated out. Heat makes this faster and produces more oil, which is exactly why we do not use it. The paste is held below 27 degrees Celsius, the threshold that allows the term cold extracted. Warmer paste gives up more oil and loses the aromatic compounds and polyphenols that make good oil worth drinking.
Mechanical extraction
The oil is separated from the water and solids by centrifuge. Nothing chemical is involved at any point. Refined and so-called light olive oils are made by treating poor oil with solvents, heat and deodorising to strip out the defects. Extra virgin cannot be made that way by definition. What comes out of the centrifuge is finished oil.
Settling and bottling
The fresh oil is allowed to settle so the fine sediment drops out, then bottled on the farm. It is not blended with any other grove, any other season, or any imported oil. Each bottle carries oil from the same rows of trees in the same harvest.
How to tell if oil has been treated this way
You cannot read most of this off a label, but three things are worth checking on any bottle you buy, ours included.
- A harvest date, not just a best before. Olive oil is a fresh product. A best-before date two years out tells you nothing about when the fruit was picked.
- A named place. Product of more than one country on the back label means the oil was blended, often from several growers across several seasons.
- Dark glass or a tin. Light degrades olive oil quickly. Clear bottles on a lit shelf are a bad sign regardless of what the front label claims.
There is more detail on the difference between local single-estate oil and the imported blends in why single estate is worth paying for. If you want to see the grove itself, the family site is at Murrindindi Olive Grove.