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.
Rio Largo lies on the south bank of the Breede River, in the Scherpenheuwel Valley outside Worcester in the Western Cape, where Nick and Brenda Wilkinson planted the estate to Italian material: Frantoio, Leccino, Coratina and FS-17. Some 18,000 trees are in full production under drip irrigation, with another 10,000 planned, and output averages about 70,000 litres a year.
Everything is pressed on the farm. Fruit is picked by hand and into the mill within six to eight hours, on presses rated at 1.5 tonnes an hour and 0.75 tonnes, run on a computerised system from Mori-Tem in Italy, and the estate picks early on purpose, accepting a lower yield for a higher polyphenol count. Speaking to the Spanish yearbook Anuario AOVE Olivar Español in 2022, Brenda Wilkinson put the estate's Flos Olei rating at 97, inside that guide's top sixty.
The South African record runs through SA Olive. Rio Largo took a place in the Absa Top 10 in 2020, and in 2022 Rio Largo Gold was one of the ten, picked by Absa and SA Olive in a second blind round from the highest-scoring golds of the SA Olive Awards. At the 2025 SA Olive Awards the estate won Gold for its Delft in the medium class, its Gold in the delicate class and its Premium in the intense class, with a Silver for its Black.
From the public record: riolargo.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.
