We grow one olive cultivar very seriously. The more I learn about it, the less interested I am in pretending olive oil should taste like one thing.
I make a fairly specific kind of olive oil.
We grow Frantoio, a Tuscan cultivar, on our farm in San Martin. We pick it on the green side, mill it here, and have spent years fussing over how to make it more aromatic, more complex and better at the table. Our oil lives pretty firmly in the green, grassy, peppery corner of the olive oil world.
I love that corner. I just don’t think it’s the whole room.
I keep several olive oils open in my own kitchen because they don’t all do the same thing. A green, tomato-leaf Picual can be wonderful with barely cooked tomatoes. A softer oil can make much more sense with delicate vegetables. A ripe, round, savory oil can disappear into a long-cooked tomato sauce in exactly the right way. None of those oils needs to beat the others. They need to taste good, and they need to make the food around them taste good.
That sounds pretty obvious when you say it out loud. It’s also not how a lot of premium olive oil gets sold.
The polyphenol problem
We get emails all the time asking for our polyphenol numbers. Sometimes the question is simply, “What’s your highest polyphenol oil?”
Polyphenols matter. They’re a family of compounds that contribute to olive oil’s bitterness, pungency, antioxidant activity and stability. They’re one of the reasons fresh extra virgin olive oil can have that pleasant bitterness on the tongue and peppery catch in the throat.
But somewhere along the way, a useful piece of information got turned into a scoreboard.
Higher became better. More burn became better. More bitterness became better. Find the bottle with the biggest number and you’ve found the best oil.
I don’t buy it.
Bitterness and pungency can be beautiful. I love tasting an oil that comes in hot, bitter and astringent every once in a while. Taste ten of those oils in a row, though, and the world starts to feel awfully small. More importantly, some of the most memorable oils I’ve tasted aren’t memorable because they hit hardest. They’re memorable because they smell like tomato leaves, flowers, ripe fruit, herbs, artichokes, green almonds, tropical fruit, warm spice, or something I wasn’t expecting at all.
That aroma matters. So does texture. So does balance. So does whether I actually want to cook dinner with it.
Official olive oil tasting doesn’t reduce quality to pungency either. Trained panels evaluate fruitiness, bitterness and pungency as separate attributes, and fruitiness itself can run from green to ripe. The International Olive Council even divides oils in its Mario Solinas quality competition into green fruitiness categories ranging from delicate to more intense, alongside a separate ripe fruitiness category.
Olive variety matters more than most people realize
Wine gave us an easy vocabulary for this years ago. Nobody needs convincing that Pinot Noir and Cabernet Sauvignon can both be excellent wines while tasting very different.
Olive oil never quite got that treatment in the United States.
There are thousands of olive cultivars grown around the world, and cultivar can have a large effect on phenolics, fatty acids, volatile aroma compounds and the sensory character of the finished oil. Ripeness matters too. So do climate, growing conditions, harvest timing, milling and storage.
That means “extra virgin olive oil” describes a standard of quality, not a single flavor.
A good oil can smell incredibly green and grassy. Another can be floral. Another can be soft and nutty, or move toward ripe fruit, herbs and savory flavors. Bitterness and pungency can range from barely there to impossible to miss.
Once you start tasting olive oil this way, the question changes. Instead of asking, “Which oil is best?” you start asking, “What does this oil taste like, and where do I want to use it?”
That’s a much more interesting question.
Verdant, Delicate and Rustic
We wanted a simple way to talk about this range without asking people to memorize a hundred cultivars or learn professional tasting vocabulary before buying a bottle.
So we came up with three loose flavor families: Verdant, Delicate and Rustic. They’re ours. They aren’t official olive oil classifications, and the edges are intentionally fuzzy.
Verdant
The green side of olive oil: cut grass, tomato leaf, green vegetables, herbs, green almond and artichoke. Often bitter or pungent, but not defined by intensity.
Delicate
Lower intensity, not lower quality. It can be green, floral, ripe, round or nutty. The common thread is a lighter touch.
Rustic
Riper fruit, roundness, savory flavors and sometimes tropical notes. Ripe is not defective; flawed oil is still flawed oil.
Our own Estate Frantoio sits on the Verdant side. It’s the style we know most intimately because it’s what we grow and mill every year.
Our first Verdant release goes somewhere else within the same family: a 2025 Picual from Jaén, Spain. It’s intensely tomato-forward, starting with tomato leaf and fresh-cut grass, then moving through green tomato, bell pepper, lettuce and endive before black pepper, warm spice and mint show up on the finish.
It’s unmistakably green. It’s also not trying to punch you in the throat.
Our first Delicate release is an organic Hojiblanca grown by Grumpy Goats Farm in California’s Capay Valley. Hojiblanca gives us a chance to show what this category can be: an oil chosen for flavor and character, not because it wins an arms race for bitterness.
We don’t have a Rustic release right now. We’ll release one when we find an oil that makes us want it on the counter.
Why is an olive farm selling somebody else’s olive oil?
This is the fair question.
We grow Frantoio, and I think we make a pretty damn good Frantoio oil. But there are extraordinary olive cultivars and oil-making traditions all over the world that we simply don’t have on our farm.
I don’t see why being serious about our own oil should require pretending those oils don’t exist.
Actually, the opposite has happened. The more time I’ve spent farming, milling and trying to understand why our oil tastes the way it does, trying to evolve the final product into what it can be, the more interested I’ve become in the flavors we can’t make here yet.
So we’re going to share some of them.
These releases may come from California, Spain, Italy, Greece or somewhere we haven’t found yet. The cultivar may change. The grower may change. We’ll tell you what the oil is, where it comes from and who grew it when we know the grower. What stays consistent is the flavor family on the front of the bottle and our judgment behind it.
The bar is not a score. I mostly think scoring olive oil is bunk anyway.
I need to taste an oil and think: I want this on my counter. I want to cook with it. It needs a clear identity, it needs to fit one of these profiles, and we need to know enough about where it came from that it isn’t just anonymous bulk oil wearing a nice label.
That’s the deal.
More oils on the counter, not one oil on a pedestal
One of my least favorite outcomes of the high-polyphenol conversation is that olive oil can start to feel like a supplement.
Someone buys the 600 ppm bottle because the number is impressive, treats it as precious, drizzles a little over dinner a few times a week, and misses the much more basic pleasure of cooking with olive oil all the time.
I’d rather have several bottles open.
Maybe one is 400-plus ppm and green as hell. Maybe another is 200 or 300 and softer. Maybe one tastes like tomato leaves and black pepper and another tastes ripe and round. Use them. Fry bread in them. Dress vegetables. Make beans. Cook tomatoes. Taste the oil while you’re cooking and decide whether it belongs in the pan or on the finished plate.
You don’t need a tasting certificate to figure this out.
A barely cooked summer tomato sauce and an overnight roasted tomato sauce are both tomato sauces, but they aren’t asking for the same thing. I’d reach for something Verdant with the first, something that can meet the fresh tomato with green aroma and pepper. For the second, thick, dark, savory and almost jammy, I’d be much more interested in a Rustic oil.
That’s where I want this idea to go.
Not toward more rules. Toward having enough experience with different oils that choosing one becomes as ordinary as deciding which vinegar to use, which chile belongs in the pot, or which wine you’d rather cook with.
There are a lot of olives in the world. They have more to say than “how many polyphenols?”
Explore extra virgin olive oil
Start with the oil that sounds good to you, not the one with the biggest number.