Blog,
Early harvest: the oil from the first olives of the season
Why the first oil of the season runs so green, what makes it different and why there is so little of it.
Every autumn, before most of the olive trees around Espejo are ready, some of our members bring the first olives of the season to the mill. They are still green or just starting to change colour, a stage growers call veraison. That fruit gives us our early-harvest oil.
Really green
Young olives are rich in chlorophyll, and you can see it in the stream: the oil runs an intense, almost glowing green, like the oil that leaves our mill in mid-November. Over the months that colour softens towards gold.
More aroma, more character
On the palate it is livelier than oil from a late harvest. It smells of freshly cut grass, olive leaf, sometimes tomato vine. It has a little pepper at the back of the throat and a little bitterness on the tongue. That is not a flaw: those are the attributes a tasting panel looks for in a fresh extra virgin oil.
Why there is so little
Early olives hold less oil than ripe ones. It takes more kilos of fruit to fill each bottle, so this oil is bottled in small quantities and sells out quickly. When we have it, we announce it here and in the shop.
How to use it
It shines raw: on toast with tomato, in a salad, drizzled over a bowl of lentils. Any extra virgin oil is fine for frying, but it would be a shame to put this one in the pan.
