Our Olive Oil

Tiber Canyon Extra Virgin Olive Oil is a late harvest, mellow, fruity olive oil with a mild piquancy. It is especially good in salad dressings, drizzled as a finish over chicken, sea food and steak, and in pasta sauces.

We also produce a Meyer lemon olive oil. This is not a flavoring that is added as an afterthought. The lemons are crushed with the olives in the mill where the oil in the peel marries with the Extra Virgin Olive Oil to produce a lively, zesty flavor.  This oil is fantastic on vegetables (if you're trying to cut down on butter, try it on baked potatoes), pasta, bread, steak, chicken, salad dressings, just about everything.

At harvest time, about one hundred of our friends come to help us pick the olives. Be assured that a lot of fun and merriment as well as hard work goes into every bottle of our olive oil. Once the olives are picked, within 24 hours they are driven to the mill at Pietra Santa Winery in Hollister. Their mill uses traditional stone wheels to crush the olives to produce a paste. The paste is passed through a centrifuge to separate the oil from the water and solid matter. The result is beautiful, delicious olive oil. When we return to the ranch with the oil, we store it in special stainless steel containers and bottle only what we need every couple of months to ensure freshness.

Our trees are the typical Tuscan varietals: leccino, frantoio, pendolino and coratina with a few each of five or six other varietals included just for good measure. A certain percentage of each varietal is planted based on their flavor characteristics and the positive qualities each possesses. This makes for what is called a “field blend,” meaning that rather than making individual oils from each varietal and then blending them together, the blending is done at harvest when they are all picked and crushed at the same time.