Every bottle is a story that starts in the grove and ends on your table
01 — The grove
Harvest timing is set by a maturity index, not by the calendar. Through the season we track our centenarian Frantoio trees block by block: soil moisture, canopy condition, how the fruit is developing on each row.
When autumn comes, the decision to pick is never made by convenience, transport schedules, or what date it happens to be. It's made by the fruit. If the trees need three more days of morning mist to reach peak polyphenol concentration, we wait three more days.
The grove sets the calendar, not the other way around.
02 — The harvest
Most producers let olives ripen to purple before picking, because soft, fully ripe fruit yields more oil per kilo. We pick green, in late September and early October, before that softening happens.
Green olives carry less oil but a higher concentration of polyphenols, the compounds responsible for both shelf life and the sharp, peppery finish that separates real extra virgin from the supermarket average. The trade-off is a measurable yield loss against a later harvest.
We take it every year.
03 — The mill
The hours between picking and crushing are where quality is lost. An olive sitting in a crate accumulates heat, starts fermenting, and begins losing its polyphenol load before it ever reaches a press. So the olives are picked in the cool morning hours and pressed the same day, no exceptions.
We work with one of the most awarded mills in Tuscany. Every harvest we bring in enters as its own isolated batch, under a protocol separate from anything else milled that day.
Nothing of ours touches anything that isn't ours.
04 — Extraction
Extraction is where yield and quality work against each other directly. Push the press harder and warmer and you get more oil out of the same olives, but heat and mechanical stress burn off the volatile compounds and antioxidants that make the oil worth drinking in the first place.
We extract cold, below 27°C, under a controlled atmosphere from the moment the olives are crushed through to storage. And we stop the press early, before the last extractable percentage point, because that last percentage point is the lowest-quality oil in the batch.
What's left in the paste is the cost of what's in the bottle
05 — Storage
After extraction, every batch goes into its own tank: temperature-controlled, logged by harvest date and field. Nothing gets combined by default. Centennial stays unblended through storage and bottling: one estate, one cultivar, one tank per batch, no exceptions.
Origin and Craft follow the same rule. Each lot goes into its own tank, measured for acidity and polyphenol content before it's assigned to a batch. Same protocol, same mill, same cold extraction as every other FILO line.
06 — Bottling
Every bottle carries a lot number, printed at bottling, not added afterward. That number is the link between what's in your hand and everything that happened before it: harvest date, milling date, and the full lab panel run on that specific batch, acidity and polyphenols included.
Because the early harvest and early stop protocol mean less oil per batch to begin with, total production each year is limited by the process itself, not by a marketing decision to make it scarce.
Look up the QR code if you want the numbers behind it. They don't change depending on who's asking.