Production and Sale of Exta Virgin Olive Oil in Tuscany, Italy

We also produce a very fine quality of extra virgin olive oil, obtained through cold mechanical extraction procedures, from olives picked and promptly pressed.

The picking starts early in November, by hand and with mechanical whips.

The olives are separated from the leaves in the field (so they return to the soil) and placed in aired crates to stop them from being squashed.

They are pressed twice a week. Then the oil is conserved in steel containers.

It doesn’t undergo filtration so it is decanted in Spring to separate from the natural deposit which takes place with time.

The conservation, together with the pressing, is very important for the maintaining of the properties of a good extra virgin olive oil.

On average we hold an acidity below 0,5% (0,2-0,3%) which garanties a long conservation in time and is also the first parameter for a good extra virgin olive oil.

The cultivation of the olive (about 2000 trees of which 1600 in production) is intensive only for one hectare: most of them are of the “leccino” and “frantoio” variety, but also “moraiolo” and “pendolino”.

This wide variety of olives lends a particular scent to the oil which is usually lost if you use only one variety.

In the last few years we have experimented with the production of pitted olive oil, which comes from pressing olives preventively pitted.

This oil has a more delicate taste and lasts longer.


In 2006 we also tried to produce oil only from frantoie olives, with great effort as our set-up is mixed.

The choice is hence made at picking time, selecting the wanted cultivars.

This increases the, already long, picking times as we must return on the same field several times.

We hope in the future to be able to experiment more the flavour of ‘monocultivar’ oils and we hope we may satisfy this curiosity!

We do not have a business oil press so we take our olives to the oil mill in Croci which has a hammer press, and a centrifuge decanter.

Our company has always promoted the diffusion of wine gastronomy adhering to the wine Tourism Movement first and to the road of oil and wine of Montalbano: “Le colline di Leonardo”, since its birth.