The Oil We Wait For: Making Olio Nuovo at Frantoio Grove

Finding the One

Our Olio Nuovo isn't necessarily the literal first oil through the mill. Sometimes the earliest batches are more bitter or astringent than I want. I like pungency, but an oil can have so much bitterness that the rest of it gets lost.

We'll wait a day, a few days, whatever it takes within that early part of harvest to find something balanced but assertive. There's no rule that it has to come from one block on one particular morning. We're tasting every batch, and eventually there's a moment when the oil feels ready.

The olives themselves don't tell the whole story. They're usually small, firm and green, but smelling one on the tree won't give you all the aromas you'll find in the oil, and although I have an odd habit of tasting them when I walk the orchard, you aren't likely to get much from that but a load of bitterness. A great deal happens after the fruit is crushed. Importantly, enzymes that had been held in different parts of the olive suddenly meet flesh and come in contact with the oil, then they start making some of the aromas and flavors we're hoping to find, like fresh cut grass, green almond, or artichoke.

When I say green almond, I don't mean the dry nut you buy in a bag. I mean the flesh around a young almond, that firm, tart, unripe stone fruit quality. If you've eaten one, it's easy to recognize when it turns up in oil.

The aromas I get most excited about can be harder to name. There may be a round, custardy quality, with something like vanilla, pastry, banana or persimmon in the middle of the tone range. Then there are the higher toned perfumey fragrances above those, sometimes floral, sometimes closer to resinous herbs like chamomile or tarragon.

When the oil first comes out of the separator, the color is almost absurd. Green and cloudy and bright enough that you want to photograph it before it begins changing. And it does begin changing. Quickly.

That green isn't proof that the oil is good - we taste oil in dark blue glasses for a reason. We want to judge it without being swayed by color, because the color can change our mind about an oil before we've had a chance to taste it. Still, standing at the mill and watching that first stream of green oil appear is one of the great pleasures of the year. Knowing that color doesn't define quality doesn't make it any less beautiful.

A Year in the Grove

Our Olio Nuovo comes from Frantoio olives grown on our 30 acre farm in San Martin. Frantoio is a Tuscan cultivar, and I'm grateful for those genetics. It gives us the grassy, pungent style that works so well for this release, but we're a California farm. We aren't trying to recreate Tuscany, so we don't even consider it. This oil comes from our weather, our heavy clay soil, our trees and our decisions here.

We sometimes say that "good oil is made in the mill, but great oil is made in the grove." What I mean is that good milling can produce delightful oils, if the fruit is handled well, but the mill isn't going to create something incredible if you don't start with incredible fruit. That comes from trees grown in living soil.

“Good oil is made in the mill, but great oil is made in the grove.”

We plant cover crops, maintain living ground cover through the year, use compost and grazing, and pay close attention to irrigation and mineral balance. Plant residues stay on the surface to protect the soil. We're trying to build soil that holds together in crumbs and aggregates, takes in water, and supports the roots and other life below us.

You notice changes in fairly ordinary ways. We used to walk the grove after rain and collect inches of heavy clay on our boots. The bare ground turned into something close to concrete mud. Maintaining cover and improving the soil has changed that experience. A big storm can still keep us out of the field, but the ground doesn't behave quite the way it used to.

I've also watched our oil become more aromatic and less harshly bitter or astringent as we've changed how we farm. Our polyphenol measurements have largely stayed high, even though we've been able to reduce a decent amount of the bitterness and astringency of our oil. My theory is that healthier trees are helping us make oil with more interesting aromas and a better balance of flavors, and that the trees are still producing polyphenols, but through metabolic pathways that favor proactive protection, rather than reaction to stress.

That's an observation I'm still working on, not a tidy experiment that pins a particular tasting note on one change in soil biology... we don't - and may never - have enough data points to determine exactly what is going on under the hood of an olive tree, but we had this theory going into these management changes and that is the general trend we've observed.

Ninety Minutes from Tree to Mill

We aim to get our fruit from the tree into the mill in about 90 minutes. Having the mill here on the farm makes that possible, but proximity doesn't do the work by itself. Bins still have to move in the order they arrived. Fruit waiting as the day warms needs shade. The mill has to keep running.

Most ways of harvesting olives cause some bruising. When the fruit is cool, handled gently and milled promptly, that damage is much easier to manage. Let bruised fruit sit warm in a bin and you've given enzymes and microbes time to start changing it before you've made any oil.

I've seen fruit delivered for milling after sitting far too long. Sometimes you can smell the problem before it reaches the crusher. That experience will make you very fond of a short trip from the grove.

We've traditionally harvested with nets and rakes. We're moving toward a branch shaker with a catch frame built for trees like ours, with short trunks and low scaffold branches. The shaker grips individual branches and the frame catches the fruit before it reaches the ground. The point is gentler fruit handling and a harvest system that lets us keep paying people well.

Farm labor in Santa Clara County is expensive because living here is expensive. If we want agriculture to remain here, the work has to make sense for the people doing it. Mechanization, in this case, isn't about removing care from harvest. It's part of finding a way to keep doing the careful version at all.

A Day in the Olive Mill

Harvest begins at sunup. It takes a while for the first bins to reach the mill, and we like to have enough fruit waiting to keep the line moving once we start. A mill is happier running steadily than stopping and starting all day.

We start the equipment from the back of the line toward the front, bringing each machine up to speed and checking it before we feed in olives. There are machines to lubricate, pumps to watch and settings to confirm. The romantic image of harvest rarely includes daily lubrication, although daily lubrication is doing quite a bit to keep the romance alive.

The olives pass under a fan that removes leaves and twigs, then through a freshwater bath with bubbling air. From there we feed them at a steady rate into the hammer mill.

Crushing is violent. The whole fruit becomes paste, pits included. I can change the hammer speed and the screen the paste passes through, a bit like changing the grind on a coffee grinder. Those choices affect extraction and how the paste behaves. Ripe or watery fruit can become difficult to separate if we crush too aggressively. If an oil is already more bitter than I want, I may pull back rather than extracting every last compound the machine can reach.

The paste then goes into the malaxer, a large tub with a slowly turning screw that kneads it. The oil inside the fruit begins as microscopic droplets. Gentle mixing helps those droplets join into larger ones that the centrifuge can separate.

This is also where many of the aromas begin to take shape. Crushing brought enzymes into contact with other parts of the olive. Time, temperature and oxygen now affect what they make and what survives.

We generally malax for 30 to 45 minutes, changing our approach with the fruit rather than treating a timer as the whole recipe.

One thing I've changed my mind about is heat. We used to add none. When the morning fruit came in extremely cold, we found that the oil wasn't developing the aromatic intensity we wanted. A little warmth, bringing the paste into the low to mid 70s Fahrenheit, has worked better for us. I care much more about the difference I can smell than the ability to say we used the coldest process imaginable.

That isn't permission to leave the paste warm and exposed for two hours. It's a judgment call. Enough time and warmth to form and capture the aromas we want, without losing them while chasing a few more gallons.

The horizontal decanter comes next. It spins the paste fast enough to separate the denser water and solids from the lighter oil. The oil still carries water and fine fruit material when it leaves, so we pass it over a screen and through a vertical separator.

What comes out is the cloudy new oil.

For our regular release, we send the oil on to filtration and protected storage. For Olio Nuovo, once we've found the lot we want, we change the setup and hold that oil separately, without filtering it.

We usually give it a few days before bottling. "Straight from the mill" doesn't mean we're catching every drop in a retail bottle. A brief rest helps keep excess water and heavy sediment out. That's different from letting the oil settle clear over weeks or months.

I'm the primary miller. Other people here can run the line, but crusher settings, malaxation time and temperature, and the way we respond to the fruit are decisions I stay closely involved with. I've learned through years of milling, classes at the UC Davis Olive Center, conversations with other millers, reading, and changing things when the oil told me I needed to.

The Olio Nuovo Label Gets Made Too

Working with artists is something I've always wanted to do. We do it with our coffee company, and Olio Nuovo gives us another chance each year.

The brief is open. We give the artist a list of plants and animals found here and invite them to the farm when possible. We're asking for a sense of this place. What they do with that is up to them.

I don't want to spend the project asking whether they could make the olive a little bigger.

For the 2026 label, we're working with Rayos Magos, a San José artist whose work crosses printmaking, collage, painting, textiles and sculpture. We were drawn to his print work. The label was made digitally, with some of that carved, printed character in the hands and marks.

The owls connect to the barn owl boxes here and the birds that help us manage rodents. They're part of the farm, not something we added to make the package look agricultural.

The artist, subject and style change each year. I like not knowing exactly what the label will look like until someone else has spent time with the place and made their own response to it.

I don't particularly want the bottle to become a collectible. After you've used one, there's usually oil on the outside and it looks like something that's spent time in a kitchen. Good. It would be a shame to do all this work so a full bottle could sit untouched on a shelf.

We've started finding other ways for the art to stick around. Shirts, and maybe canvas totes or bandannas. I'd like the artwork to have a longer life.

The oil should get eaten.

Why Olio Nuovo Is Temporarily Limited

We don't make Olio Nuovo artificially scarce. Our farm is large enough that we could set aside more oil if more people wanted it. Frankly, selling the oil when we make it would be lovely. It means less inventory sitting in tanks and less harvest expense waiting to be paid back.

“The limit is time.”

The limit is time.

We only harvest once a year, and unfiltered new oil keeps changing after we make it. We try to bottle enough to share it through the holidays. We're not trying to engineer a release that sells out before anyone has a fair chance to buy it. But I don't want to be selling this oil in January just because a few cases remain.

If we have a case or two left after the season, we take it home and use it. Then our filtered Frantoio oil follows, still remarkably fresh and better suited to staying with you through the year.

We've usually released Olio Nuovo once it was ready to ship. We may open preorders earlier this year, but harvest has a way of resisting a fixed marketing calendar. A rainstorm can keep equipment out of a saturated field. The particular lot we want may arrive a little later. Sometimes, less nobly, everyone qualified to bottle oil is working in the mill and the labels aren't ready.

We're a small team. The farming, milling and packing aren't separate departments. They're people standing in different places on the same long day.

Harvest Month

People say "harvest week." For us, it's harvest month, and then some.

The first couple of days are exciting. The first oil comes out, we taste the season for the first time, and we start to see what a year of work has made. It's also nerve-racking because we know how many things can go wrong. Machinery has little interest in sentiment, and fruit doesn't stop ripening because a part is late.

Then the excitement settles into work. Harvesting, milling, fixing equipment, bottling, getting copy to the email team, packing orders, shipping gifts. It becomes a sprint and a marathon at the same time, which is a terrible way to organize a sporting event but a fairly accurate description of November and December.

Someone asked where I'd put a visitor if they could stand in only one place during production: the grove, the washer, the crusher, the separator, the bottling line or the tasting table.

Out of the way. Please.

I do want people to see it. Seeing oil appear from fruit is one of those things that changes your idea of what food is. But during harvest, the same few people are keeping all of it moving. There isn't much room, physically or mentally, for someone to be standing in the wrong spot.

The hardest part of making Olio Nuovo isn't usually making good oil. Growing the crop with care has become part of our rhythm. Milling quickly has become part of our rhythm too. The hard part is running the business around those things without asking the grove or the mill to wait.

My birthday is December 22. By then, we've usually gone from harvest straight through bottling and the last push to get holiday orders out. It's two months of working flat out, and then all at once it stops.

We sit down. There's beautiful fresh oil in the kitchen. Finally, there's time to enjoy some ourselves.

That's the moment I think about when I say this oil is a celebration of the harvest. Not a slogan. The work is done, at least for a minute. There's a plate of greens, some bread, and the bottle is open on the table.