There are few better ways to enjoy an olive oil than with a loaf of good bread.

Not because bread is some sort of official tasting tool. It isn't. Bread actually gets in the way if you're trying to evaluate an oil professionally, but when you're sitting around the table with friends, a loaf of bread from Matriarch, a drizzle of oil on a plate, and maybe a pinch of crunchy sea salt, all of that stops mattering. You're not judging anything anymore. You're just eating.

That's usually how these conversations start.

Somebody tears off another piece of bread. Somebody else tops off the wine glasses. The bottle makes another trip around the table. Eventually someone says something like, “This doesn't taste like the lemon olive oils I've had before.”

I usually smile, because I know where we're headed.

For most of my life, I would've been the first person to tell you that flavored olive oil wasn't really my thing. If you had asked us ten years ago whether Frantoio Grove would ever make a Meyer lemon olive oil, I probably would've laughed a little and changed the subject. I'd spent enough time around olive mills, UC Davis classes, California Olive Oil Council events, and plenty of long conversations with growers and millers to absorb the industry's opinion on flavored oils. It wasn't exactly subtle, but then again, they weren't entirely wrong.

For a long time, “flavored olive oil” usually meant a tank of olive oil with lemon essential oil, garlic flavoring, or some other “natural flavor” dumped in. Sometimes those oils started with perfectly respectable extra virgin olive oil. Often they didn't. One of the less glamorous realities of the olive oil business was that flavorings could also hide older oils, tired oils, or oils with defects that nobody wanted to taste on their own. It wasn't hard to understand why serious producers wanted to keep their distance from that category altogether.

That was the story I believed for years.

Like a lot of things in farming, though, the longer we kept paying attention, the harder it became to believe in absolutes.

My family planted our orchard in 2005, but we'd already been hanging around olive oil classes, tasting panels, UC Davis events, and California Olive Oil Council gatherings for years before that. California olive oil was still finding its footing. We all knew we could make oils that stood shoulder to shoulder with anything in the world, but convincing everyone else of that was another matter entirely. There was a real sense that the industry had to take itself seriously if anyone else was going to.

So we became, understandably, a little protective.

Purity mattered.

Freshness mattered.

Extra virgin mattered.

The idea of spending a year growing a beautiful crop of olives, then turning some of it into a “lemon oil” felt, at best, like a distraction. At worst, it felt like a step backwards. And, honestly, there was good reason for that attitude. If that's the version of flavored olive oil you grew up with, I completely understand why you'd write off the entire category. I did too.

The thing about farming, though, is that it has a habit of making you reconsider opinions that once felt obvious. Every season gives you another chance to discover that reality is usually a little more complicated than the story you started with.

Then, almost without noticing, we started running into a different kind of flavored olive oil.

Not at the grocery store, usually from other growers and millers. Someone would pour a little into a tasting glass or tear off a piece of bread and say, “Try this.”

These weren't oils that tasted like somebody had added a squirt of pine sol to the tank. They tasted quieter than that, more settled. Less like two ingredients sharing the same bottle and more like they had somehow always belonged together. So I decided they deserved a second look.

One of the people who helped us take that second look was Albert Katz.

Albert had been making a Meyer lemon olive oil for years, and it had become something of a customer favorite. We'd talked about making one together for a while, but there was a practical problem: Meyer lemons and olives used to ripen at roughly the same time. As our olive harvests have moved earlier and the Meyer lemon season has moved later, that window has gotten narrower and narrower.

Last year, we got lucky twice.

A citrus grower I buy from at our local farmers market was able to bring us some early Meyer lemons from Southern California. At about the same time, rain had cut Albert’s harvest short, leaving a day’s harvest on the trees. When the fields finally dried out enough to get back in, we discovered that the Taggiasca still hanging on the trees had somehow made it through without frost damage or becoming waterlogged and tired.

So we had our citrus grower send us some lemons on his route up to the Bay Area, and Albert picked the rest of his olives.

The late harvest Taggiasca made a beautiful oil on its own: delicate, floral, and much softer than the more pungent oils we often make. We took some of that fruit and milled it with the Meyer lemons.

Albert brought years of experience making these oils, including some much needed guidance on fruit and ratios. We brought our own milling experience to the equation. Mostly, though, we had good olives and good lemons, which turns out to solve a remarkable number of problems.

The resulting oil was fantastic. A little more lemon forward than the Meyer lemon oils Albert had traditionally made, but we liked where it landed and decided not to blend it back toward a more olive forward style.

More importantly, making that oil together gave us the confidence to keep pulling on the thread.

And once I start pulling on a thread, I have a hard time leaving it alone.

That's probably a personality flaw more than anything else.

Sometimes that's useful, sometimes it just creates more work for me (and our team), but we started playing around to see where it would lead.

Not because I thought we were going to reinvent anything. We certainly weren't the first people to do this. I wanted to understand what made these oils work. Was it simply better ingredients? Better olive oil? Better citrus? Was there something happening during the process that you couldn't get by opening a bottle of lemon essential oil and stirring it into finished olive oil?

The only way I know how to answer questions like that is to make things.

Some batches were really good.

Some weren't.

One year the Meyer lemons looked perfectly fine until we started working with them. The finished oil had a slightly tired, almost funky note that wasn't terrible, but it wasn't something I wanted our name on either, so we made the decision to compost the whole batch.

Another time, the lemons just didn't come through louder than a whisper. If we'd bottled that batch, people probably would've thought, “That's nice,” but it didn’t feel like it was our oil, so again we took that batch out to the compost pile, told it about the rabbits, and said goodbye.

If somebody opens a bottle of Meyer lemon olive oil, I don't want them wondering where the Meyer lemons went.

The thing is that almost none of the lessons we've learned have been the ones I expected.

Originally I thought we'd simply crush whole Meyer lemons and let the mill do the rest. It seemed like the obvious approach. Instead, we kept finding ourselves asking strange little questions that nobody seemed to have good answers for.

What happens if we use more fruit? What happens if we use less? How much is too much? Are we actually getting anything from the juice, or is all the character living somewhere else? Every batch became another data point. Little by little, the picture started coming into focus.

The thing about projects like this is that they remind me farming doesn't care very much about certainty. You can walk into the mill convinced you know exactly what's going to happen. A few hours later you'll have a completely different opinion.

If you're paying attention, that's not failure, it’s another data point. That's the mindset this whole project runs on.

By this point you're probably wondering what we actually do. The honest answer is that it's less dramatic than people expect.

We begin with fresh Meyer lemons, which get crushed in our mill, allowing their natural aromas to become part of the oil as they move through the process. Once we're satisfied, the fruit is carefully separated away, along with the moisture it naturally brings, leaving behind only the citrus character that started inside the peel.

That's really it.

There isn't a bottle of lemon essential oil waiting at the end. There aren't flavor packets or extracts. There isn't a moment where somebody decides the oil needs “just a little more lemon.”

Everything that ends up in the bottle begins as fresh fruit.

At the end of the day, though, I don't really think about this as a flavored olive oil, I think about it as an olive oil that has found a particular place in the kitchen.

When there's a pot of white beans on the stove, or a platter of grilled zucchini, peppers, and eggplant coming off the barbecue, I don't want an oil that shouts over everything else. I want one that quietly pulls the whole meal together.

It has become one of my favorite oils for salads, grilled veggies, white beans, bitter greens, fresh ricotta, or simply a piece of good bread while dinner is still coming together.

That's really where I hope this bottle ends up. Not sitting on a shelf because it's “special.” Not waiting for the perfect occasion. Just becoming part of the way you cook.

If anything, I hope people stop thinking about the Meyer lemons after the first few bites and I hope they start thinking about making another salad because the tomatoes are finally in season. Or deciding the beans need one more drizzle before they go to the table. Or tearing off another piece of bread because there's still a little oil left in the bottom of the dish.

That's always been the point: to make something good enough that the conversation moves on while everyone keeps eating.