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.
Mate sits at Zambratija, on the Savudrija headland at the northern tip of Istria, a few hundred metres from the Adriatic, on what the estate describes as Istrian red soil: chalk, clay, calcium and iron, layered so that fertile and poorer bands alternate and the dry summers still find something to draw on. Mate Vekić planted it at the end of the 1990s and into the early 2000s, setting his first tree, by the producer's account, at the age of 75; his daughter Aleksandra Vekić runs the estate and mill now. Istria County's official producer register puts the grove at 27,500 trees over 69 hectares at 50 metres above sea level, planted to Frantoio, Leccino, Istarska bjelica, Pendolino and Buža, and lists four certified organic extra virgin oils: the monocultivars Bianca Bellezza, Timbro Istriano and Viola Tonda, plus a blend, Trasparenza Marina.
Flos Olei is what set the record. The guide first listed the estate at 82 points, then 99, and in 2023 gave Bianca Bellezza a full 100 out of 100 — one of only nine oils at maximum score in that edition, three of the others Spanish and five Italian, and enough to enter the guide's Hall of Fame. The farm's recognitions page carries 100/100 in every edition since. EVOOLEUM has tracked alongside it: Bianca Bellezza at 94 points and Best of Croatia in 2023, Timbro Istriano at 95 points, Best Frantoio and Best from Croatia in 2025, and a place among the guide's ten healthiest oils in 2026 at 698 ppm phenols.
From the public record: mateoliveoil.com · istra.hr · croatiaweek.com · total-croatia-news.com
From a Pag Island grove of eighty thousand wild-grafted trees to a single trunk still hand-picked every October, the Adriatic keeps its ancient olives in active use.
On the northern tip of Pag Island, the Olive Gardens of Lun cover some 24 hectares with roughly 80,000 trees, most of them wild Olea oleaster grafted with cultivated wood centuries ago. Two specimens within the gardens carry names of their own: one attributed to around 2,000 years, confirmed by DNA as a single continuous tree, and a second put at about 1,600 years that still yields up to 300 kilograms of fruit. The cooperative Maslinarska zadruga Lun presses and sells the oil. The gardens sit inside a 23.6-hectare botanical reserve, the wider etno-zone protected since 1975, though not on Croatia's UNESCO tentative list.
Across the water in Brijuni National Park, a single tree on Veliki Brijun island was radiocarbon-dated by Zagreb's Ruđer Bošković Institute in the 1960s to roughly 1,600 years. It is still hand-picked every October, yielding about 30 kilograms of fruit that renders down to some 4.1 kilograms of oil, tested at 0.11 per cent free acidity and a peroxide value of 1.95. Storm damage from the 1970s was repaired with concrete, and a 2017 effort to brand the oil commercially with the University of Zagreb and the Palunko mill has yet to produce a settled retail line.
South along the coast, near Mirovica between Bar and Ulcinj, Stara Maslina was tested by Istanbul University's Forestry Faculty in 2015, which put its age at 2,240 years from tissue and growth-ring analysis; rounder figures of 2,242 to 2,250 circulate in the press. The tree carries a cultivar called Žutica and was declared a natural monument in either 1957 or 1963; sources disagree on which. Admission is charged at the gate, at a nominal rate with a concession; gates open 08:00 to 18:00. Concrete paving around its base was found in 2023 to trap water and cause dieback; drainage work has since brought new shoots. No bottle carries the tree's own name, but Bar producers working the same Žutica groves, among them Barsko Zlato and Uljara Lučka, sell commercially close by.
Istria supplies the region's working mills. At Vodnjan, Chiavalon presses five local varieties, Buža and Istarska bjelica among them, into ranges including Romano and Ex Albis, including an organic half-litre. OIO Vivo, between Pula and Vodnjan, works 60 hectares and about 15,000 trees with its own tasting room.
The dossier for an Adriatic lot names the island or coastal comune of origin, the grafted cultivar, and, where testing exists, the radiocarbon or ring-count reading behind the tree's attributed age.
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.
