An honest accounting of where the price comes from. From a Sicilian family who, frankly, wishes it cost less too.
Eighty-five dollars is a lot of money for olive oil. We are aware. We are not unaware. We thought about charging less. Then we tried it, and the math got difficult. Here is what eighty-five dollars actually pays for.
Every November, the entire Di Marco family stops their lives for eight days. Five generations on wooden ladders, gloved hands, hand-rakes. No machines. Mechanical shake-harvesters bruise the fruit; bruised fruit makes bitter oil. So we don’t use them.
If you’d like to know what the cheap part of olive oil production looks like, it’s the harvesting. We’ve gone the other way.
The most expensive instrument in our kitchen is a person.
Most premium olive oil brands solve the price problem by making more of it. Blend from five countries, bottle in Italy, scale the operation. We considered that. We don’t do it.
One Sicilian estate, fourteen hectares, two olive varieties planted in 1886. Six hundred bottles a year, full stop. When they’re sold, we’re done until November. There is a price for this kind of restraint, and you’re looking at it.
Most luxury is fake scarcity. Ours is just supply.
Industrial olive-oil production runs the press warm to extract more oil from each olive. The trade-off is flavour and polyphenols, which heat strips out. We run cold and we run fast.
What gets picked Monday morning is in the press by Monday afternoon. It is, broadly, the least efficient way to make olive oil. The result is better. The result is the price.
Heat is cheaper. We don’t use it.
Supermarket “extra virgin” olive oil tests at 80 to 150 mg/kg total polyphenols. Ours is lab-tested at 215. Three times the supermarket average. Free acidity 0.14% (EU max for “extra virgin” is 0.8%). Ranked third in the world at the 2024 international olive oil competition.
The chemistry is the price. Or to put it the other way around: cheaper olive oil is cheaper because the chemistry isn’t there.
If you can’t taste it on the first pour, we’ll refund you. Every cent.
Harvest-dated. Single-estate. Single-varietal split (60% Nocellara, 40% Biancolilla). Lab-tested every batch. Pressed November 2025, bottled December 2025, shipped from a New Jersey partner two days from your door.
Most olive oil hides where it’s from, when it was made, and what’s in it. We hide nothing. Transparency is, on a per-bottle basis, more expensive than blending. So is the price.
$10 olive oil hides what’s in the bottle. Ours doesn’t.
Yes. Eighty-five dollars.
Still reading? Good.
Get a bottle for $85 →“Best olive oil I’ve ever used. The flavour is incredible, bold, fruity, perfectly peppery. Worth every cent.”
“I balked at the price. Then I tasted it. The throat catch on the first pour stopped me. Now we won’t use anything else.”
If the first pour doesn’t taste unmistakably different from anything you’ve poured before, full refund. Every cent. No forms. Keep the bottle.
Try the 2025 vintage →