Honest Toil Cold Pressed Greek Extra Virgin Olive Oil

We’re determined to share an olive oil that’s exactly how it comes here in the village, fresh from the press; it’s completely unfiltered, so once pressed, it isn’t put through any additional processes. Everything is pressed the same day it’s picked and the oil has an acidity of between 0.2-0.3%, which is pretty impressively low. It’s also completely unblended: unlike most “extra virgin olive oil” found on supermarket shelves, it really is small-batch production, and isn’t mixed with inferior oils or oil from previous harvests… consequently it tastes ridiculously good. As it's unfiltered, the oil contains the sediment from olive skins and pips, giving it a great green opaqueness with a thick texture, and the raw, grassy result is pretty much the same thing the ancient Greeks would have consumed!

Both the lands and the village presses here are locally owned and run as family businesses – groves with a few hundred trees are considered large farms, which is in stark contrast to the intensive, large-scale olive oil production characteristic of other big olive cultivating regions. We harvest the olives with traditional, manual, low-impact methods, using sticks with ‘propeller-like’ endings that remove the olives from the branches, letting them fall onto large nets spread underneath the trees. The olives are then gathered into sacks and taken to the village press in the evening.

Presses here still function on a collective basis: farmers bring in the harvested olives and hand over a percentage of the oil in exchange for the pressing. Everyone knows everyone and the whole process is based on trust – this is how’s been for centuries. Together with Tom’s family, we look after our four small olive groves, harvesting them with the help of family and friends every year. As customers have started to notice that our oil really is something different, we’ve debated taking a loan to buy more olive trees, but instead decided to employ a different model and work with the other small farmers in the neighbourhood. This way, we guarantee an income for them and support local, traditional forms of olive picking, making sure that the high quality extra virgin olive oil from these groves ends up directly on your table instead of being mixed in with inferior oils by big-scale, big-production corporations.

Our whole ethos is based on direct cooperation; with small-scale farmers, as well as small businesses along the line, including delivery, distributors and the stockists that ultimately sell the fruits of our toil...

We’re determined to keep it simple, so just produce the one variety of olive, and the result is a properly cold-pressed, completely unblended and unfiltered extra virgin olive oil; it really is just raw squashed Koroneiki olives.

Buy Honest Toil Extra Virgin Olive Oil at Ratton Pantry.