Harvest season is kind of a big deal where we come from, because well, our business depends on it. Olive oil comes from — you guessed it — olives!!! And unlike money, olives do grow on trees. Lots and lots of trees! And what do you call it when a bunch of olive trees get together? A GROVE!!! (Not a joke, that’s really what it’s called.)

The Groves

Olive groves can look a lot of different ways. You’ve got your Super High Density (SHD) Groves that have about 600-800 olive trees per acre. Then you’ve got your Intensive High Density Groves with up to 160 trees per acre. And then there are your Low Density Groves (the best kind!!) with only about 40 trees per acre. The lower the density, the healthier the trees, and the happier the olives. We, of course, only farm using Low Density practices, so that we can offer the very best olives and the most delicious olive oil!

The Harvest

For us, harvest season has two parts:  the early harvest, and then the peak harvest.

Early Harvest

The olives on our farms *begin* to ripen in October. Key word: begin. They’re not totally ripe at this point, so they’re pretty firm and need to be handpicked off the branch. We harvest these young, green olives to make our bold and punchy “Drizzle” — young, early-harvest olives = spicy, flavor-packed oil with higher antioxidant content! 

Peak Harvest 

We leave some olives on the trees to continue to ripen, and come back in November and sometimes December, AKA peak-harvest season, to get ‘em! At this point, they’re more mature, juicier, and have a bit of a darker color. Because they’re more mature they don’t need to be handpicked (whew), and instead our farmers use these big tools that shake the branches until the olives fall off. They basically look like big rakes! These mature, juicy olives make for a more mild and mellow olive oil — that’s our “Sizzle” Extra Virgin Olive Oil for everyday cooking.

Aaaaand the olive oil!!!

After they’re harvested, our olives travel a *very* short distance to be pressed, extracted, filtered, and bottled! At Graza, all of the harvesting, pressing, and bottling happens in the very same season — so no olives or olive oil are sitting around going bad. Then that perfect delicious oil gets shipped straight to you, so you can enjoy crazy fresh olive oil in the comfort of your own home (or wherever you enjoy your olive oil)!