Our Story
Three estates in Tuscany, a hillside that was here long before any of us, and the long way round to a bottle with your name on it.
How it began
Follow the line down. The grove stood here for close to four hundred years before our name went on the gate, and only recently did we open it to anyone else.
Long before anyone thought to write it down, someone terraced this slope above the Val d'Orcia and pushed olive cuttings into the galestro. A handful of those trees are still standing, still bearing. They are the oldest thing we look after, and the only part of this business none of us can take credit for.
When the old sharecropping system finally came apart, the estate sat neglected for years. Ettore's father took it on for very little money and a great deal of work, and pressed the family's first harvest under their own name the following autumn. He slept beside the tank that night.
Ettore grew up between the rows and learned the work twice over: once from his father, and once from the trees themselves. He took the estate on in his twenties and spent the next four decades doing one thing well: picking by hand, and pressing before the day was out.
One by one his children came back from cities that had nothing to do with olives, and started arguing with their father about how the oil should reach people. He let them win slowly. What they had that he did not was a way of explaining a hillside to someone who had never stood on it.
Two neighbouring estates came up in the same decade, both with old trees and no one left to tend them. Taking them on made us three groves instead of one, and gave us the range of soil and altitude that lets a single harvest taste of more than one hillside.
The idea was simple enough that it took years to get right: let someone adopt a single tree, follow its season on the map, and receive the oil that tree actually made, under a label with their own words on it. Ettore still thinks it is a strange way to sell oil. He also reads every message that comes back.
Where we are
All three sit within a couple of hours of each other in Tuscany, on different soil and at different heights, which is why one harvest can taste of more than one hillside. Adopt a tree on any of them and follow its season on the grove map.
Val d'Orcia, prov. Siena
Frantoio, Moraiolo and Leccino on galestro and alberese. The oldest trees, and the press everything else is measured against.
Colline Metallifere, prov. Grosseto
Higher, cooler and later to ripen. Mostly Moraiolo, which gives the pepper at the back of the throat.
Maremma, prov. Livorno
Sea air and lighter soil. Leccino and Pendolino, softer and rounder, picked first each year.
prov. Trapani
Not ours, but family to us. The sensors behind the live grove readings sit here, in the earliest-harvesting grove we work with.
The family
Four of us look after the trees and everything that follows them. If you write to us, one of these people answers.
Second generation
Took the estate on from his father and ran it for forty years. Less involved in the day to day now, but the grove is still unmistakably his, and no oil leaves without him tasting it.
Runs YouGróve
The eldest. She built the adoption programme and runs it: the map, the labels, the standard every one of the three estates is held to.
The groves
The agricultural one. He looks after the trees across all three estates, and the old rows on the home slope most of all.
Keeper · Poggio Sant’Elmo
Has worked the high slope for more than twenty years, through owners who came and went. He knows which trees sulk in a dry spring.