Olive Auction built this page from public records so buyers can find the estate. Its own people can claim it at no cost — complete the story, list lots, answer buyers.
After a claim, we confirm by emailEverything here comes from public sources — award lists, certification registers, the territory inventories. The rest of the story — the family, the grove, the real age of the trees, this year's lab sheet — only the mill can tell, and it is the part buyers bid on.
CARM stands for Casa Agrícola Roboredo Madeira, and the company is still wholly owned by the family that started it, from records the family traces to the mid-seventeenth century. The ground is around the village of Almendra, in the Douro Superior, inside the Côa Valley Archaeological Reserve. Celso Madeira, a civil engineering graduate of the University of Porto, planted the first Douro vineyard on bulldozer-cut terraces in 1966 and turned the whole operation over to organic farming in 1995, early enough that CARM describes itself as one of the pioneers of organic olive growing in Portugal.
The holding now runs to about 220 hectares of olive grove alongside some 200 of vineyard and 60 of almond, across five quintas — Bispado, Calabria, Marvalhas, Urze and Verdelhas — with the biggest olive planting the 107 hectares at Quinta da Urze. The groves sit between 150 and 450 metres above sea level on poor schist soils, in a climate of sharp swings between summer and winter.
For Praemium, the varieties selected are Madural, Negrinha and Verdeal. Picking runs from early November to mid-December, by hand on the steepest slopes and by mechanical vibration elsewhere, and extraction is cold and continuous, through a traditional stone mill and a two-phase decanter, with acidity held between 0.1 and 0.2 per cent. Every quinta supplying the oil falls inside the protected designation for Trás-os-Montes and Alto Douro olive oils, certified by Sativa and overseen by AOTAD's panel of tasters.
From the public record: carm.pt
A producer account takes a minute — name, mill, region. We attach this profile the same day.
Lab numbers, tree references, harvest dates, a photo — the tap-through form asks only for what buyers pay for.
Auction with a confidential reserve, or a fixed-price allocation. We review it and it goes live.
The catalogue goes to this list before it goes on the site. When the sale closes you get every hammer price from it — including the ones that disappointed.
Two emails. Then quiet until Sale No. 2.
