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.
The Khalaf family's groves lie at Rameh, at 550 metres in the Galilee Mountains of northern Israel: 50 acres, or 200 dunams, of Souri olives, a variety the family traces to Sour, or Tyre. The producer dates the family's presence there to 1862 and its cultivation of the orchard across the past 160 years, and attributes ages above 1,000 years to the trees, some of them above 2,000. Nothing is irrigated or artificially fertilised; the producer calls this Baal growing, rain-fed as the season gives it.
The family record runs through Khalil Khalaf, born in Rameh in 1872, who left in 1902 to avoid Ottoman conscription, worked American coal mines, then a business of his own in New York State, returned in 1924, and built the village's first stone house in 1927. In 1990 two of his sons bought further groves and an old press for the family's own use; in 2015 that was replaced with a closed-cycle mill that limits residue and contact with oxygen. From 2020 two of Khalil's granddaughters, Basma, who spent eighteen years at Intel, and Maria, an engineer, took the estate outward while their father kept tending the groves, and the first official export followed in 2025.
Rameh's oil was the subject of a New York Times feature on 19 October 2021. Laboratory analysis by Veltia Cyprus put the 2025 Reserve Harvest at 1,024.4 mg/kg total polyphenols, with 164.2 mg/kg oleocanthal and 133.2 mg/kg oleacein; the producer announced a Gold Medal from the 2023 Dubai International Olive Oil Competition in January 2024.
From the public record: khalafolives.com
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.
