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.
Moulin d'Opio sits in the hills between Cannes and Grasse, on a site the mill's own account dates to the fifteenth century. Milling there has been continuous since 1848, and for seven generations it was the Michel family's. That account describes a Monsieur Authion taking the establishment over in 1848, a wheel driven by water from the Brague, and a shift to more productive equipment under Roger Michel, whose daughter Christine later added modern installations while keeping the old cut-stone presses and granite millstones, turned by wooden gearing, in place. The mill's visitor listing put the annual crush at 700 to 1,000 tonnes of olives, worked from November to February.
The recent chapter is a matter of public record. The Michel family stopped pressing at the end of 2023. The Communauté d'agglomération Sophia Antipolis bought the mill in September 2024 with the stated aim of safeguarding the site as agricultural heritage and continuing its olive-growing and commercial activity; the Alpes-Maritimes department calls the mill essential to Nice AOC oil and olive production, taking in more than 60 per cent of the department's olives. It reopened on 28 October 2024 in partnership with SCIC Les Ferrages, a citizens' cooperative committed to sustainable farming, and pressed about 450 tonnes that season. After a call for projects in 2025, SCIC Les Ferrages de Châteauneuf and Neede were chosen to run the site, and the mill reopened again on 27 October 2025.
From the public record: entrepriseetdecouverte.fr · departement06.fr · agglo-sophiaantipolis.fr · ici.fr
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.
