The Journal
Notes from the house
Fourteen mills, six thousand trees
Territori del Sénia · July 2026
Between the Ebro delta and the Maestrat hills, three provinces share a landscape that reads like a misprint: 6,358 olive trees with trunks wider than 3.5 metres, each one measured, numbered and entered in a public inventory. Almost every one is a Farga — a variety that barely exists anywhere else, pressed here since before the towns around it had their present names.
Fourteen mills hold the right to sell oil under the territory's guarantee mark. Some are cooperatives pressing a few certified drums a season; some bottle numbered runs that end up at Harrods. The price spread inside this single certified class runs from under €20 a half-litre at the mill gate to €161.68 for Miliunverd's Arbor Sacris, and to €249.60 for the neighbouring Oldfargus 2000 — the same variety, the same hills, a forty-fold spread decided almost entirely by who tells the story and where it is heard.
That spread is the reason this house exists. A catalogued tree is a fact. A lab sheet is a fact. What the oil is worth was never a fact — it was whatever the nearest shelf said. Open bidding is how a fact finds its price.
After Xylella
Puglia · the survivors
Since 2013, Xylella fastidiosa has killed olive trees across Salento by the million. Quarantine lines moved north year after year; groves that had been pressed for thirty generations went grey in two summers. It is the worst thing to happen to European olive growing in living memory, and it is not finished.
North of the epidemic, on the coastal plain between Ostuni, Fasano and Monopoli, the monumental groves still stand — protected by a regional law that registers each tree, surveyed with GPS, monumentality argued tree by tree on trunk, form and history. Oil from these groves now carries something it never had to carry before: the weight of being what remains.
The house lists Puglian monumental lots with the register reference on the dossier. When a grove has outlived an epidemic, the least a catalogue can do is say so precisely.
How to read a lot dossier
The numbers that matter · and the one that doesn't exist
Free acidity tells you how carefully the fruit was handled — the legal ceiling for extra virgin is 0.8%, the lots in this room typically show 0.1 to 0.3. Peroxide value and the K-indices track oxidation; an accredited panel's medians for fruitiness, bitterness and pungency, with zero defects, are what legally make an oil extra virgin at all. Polyphenols are the number the health market pays for: 250 mg/kg earns the EU's protection-of-blood-lipids claim, 500 is the high-phenolic tier, and verified assays above 1,000 exist and trade at supplement prices. Method matters — the EU claim recognises the hydrolysis-HPLC measurement, so that is the one the dossier displays.
Then there is the number that does not exist: certified age. No laboratory has ever dated living olive wood much past 680 years, because the oldest heartwood rots out of the middle of the tree, and a wide trunk is not a birth certificate. Every "two-thousand-year-old olive" you have ever read about is a heritage attribution, not a measurement.
The house's dossiers therefore state what can be proven — catalogue number, measured trunk, cultivar, harvest, chemistry, panel grade — and let the provenance speak without borrowed zeros. Collectors notice the difference. So do the mills that earned their numbers.
