When tasting authentic extra virgin olive oil, the powerful herb and peppery taste should catch in the back of your throat, making you cough and teary eyed. If you taste any oil without these sensations, you are probably using a lower grade oil that has been blended witch cheaper vegetable oils (sunflower, soybean or rape) or has been chemically modified.

We harvest our olives early (beginning to mid-October), just before the olives turn from deep green to green brown. This is the moment that decides if our oil will have its characteristic green grassy herby taste. If we wait too long the oil loses this aspect, if we harvest too early we get too much of it. A lot of oil producers wait much longer to harvest their olives. The longer they wait, the higher the oil content of the olive will be but the more “bite” the oil will lose. When we harvest early, we get around 10-12% of oil out of an olive, wait longer, and you will finally get around 20%. Since we produce purely for quality and definitely not for yield, we stick to early harvest and green flavours.

Our olive oil is immaculate and naked, we only press our own olives (we make single estate olive oil, i.e. we do not mix our oil with oil from olives that are not grown on our farm) and we bottle our own production. We have chosen to lightly filter our oil, complete filtering removes all particles, but it is also these particles that give the oil its unique taste. Filtering lightly keeps a balance between the aesthetic aspect of the oil and taste, so you will still find some deposit in the bottle.

A unique taste

Each harvest will result in an oil with a unique taste for each year. We are highly dependent on what nature gives us and with varying weather the taste of our oil will also vary slightly. Big rainstorms in July may grow the olives more than usual which will lead to a milder taste, whilst rain in August (rare but possible) will lead to a larger nut making the oil slightly more bitter.

Huile dolive bio Domaine de Querubi

Health benefits

Keys urged the importance of the “Mediterranean diet”, which has vegetables, fruit, fish, bread, pasta, moderate amounts of dairy products, wine and large quantities of olive oil as its core ingredients. Since the 1980’s much has been published on the important health benefits of olive oil, and a lot of research is still under way, but the health benefits of regular olive oil consumption are abundant.

The care given to our product olive oil

Olive oil’s worst enemies are oxygen, heat and light. We have waxed the cork in the bottle to make sure that the bottle is airtight and that our bottles reach our customers without any outside tampering.

Fraud within the olive oil industry is unfortunately a recurring theme with a very long history, you only have to look on the internet or read ‘Extra Virginity’ by Tom Mueller. For this reason we retain full control over our oil : we press under our own supervision, bottle, seal, stamp and package on the estate and transport it ourselves to ensure its purity. All our procedures and practices are checked by a French certification institute.

The best way to remove the wax seal is to use a blunt knife and gently cut it away.

We chose a transparent bottle so customers can enjoy the beauty of the oil’s vivid green colour, but be sure to place the bottle back in its box after use, and to store it in a cool and dark place. The ideal storage temperature is around 14 degrees Celsius. If kept in a cool and dry place in its box, properly closed, the oil will be good 12 to 18 months after bottling, but after that the oil will lose some of its colour and taste.