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.
De Rustica was started in 2006 by Rob Still, a mining businessman who wanted to put something back into South Africa. The ground he chose was in the Oudemuragie valley near De Rust, under the Swartberg in the Klein Karoo, land that came onto the market after the valley's ostrich farming collapsed; he bought one farm, then kept extending eleven kilometres up the valley until the estate reached 3,300 hectares, 550 of them irrigable. The name points two ways, to the village of De Rust and to De Re Rustica, the Roman writer Columella's farming manual; the feather in the mark stands for the families who worked the valley's ostrich farms.
Of that, 135 hectares carry olives: 77,000 trees, planted mostly between 2006 and 2009, with 20 hectares added between 2021 and 2023 and 5 more in 2024. Frantoio, its clone Favolosa and Coratina came from Tuscany, Kalamata and Manzanilla are grown for the table, and the orchards run on a double drip system fed by gravity from mountain catchment dams. Picking begins in late March, by hand, with combs onto shade cloth.
Coratina put the estate on the international record. EVOOLEUM placed the Estate Collection Coratina first in its world ranking in 2023 at 97 points and second in 2025 at 96, and the oil has taken Gold at the New York International Olive Oil Competition repeatedly since 2018. At the 2025 SA Olive Awards, De Rustica won five Golds, for its Coratina, Favolosa, Intense, Medium and Delicate.
From the public record: derustica.co.za · saolive.co.za
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.
