HOW OUR OLIVE OIL GETS HERE
Our olive oil comes to us in 200kg barrels, all of it, of course, from the most recent harvest and ‘pressing’ (milling, extraction). After the ten-day crossing of the cold North Atlantic it has to be cleared through US Customs and the FDA at Port Elizabeth, NJ. Then it’s delivered to our warehouse in the South Bronx where it’s kept at a chilly 23 Centigrade (73.4 Fahrenheit).
We never pump this oil into a bottle until you order it. The result is olive oil as fresh as the day it was extracted.
Our millers are instructed to not filter our oil. We prefer unfiltered olive oil for several reasons, all good. One is the most inconsequential — we are thrilled by cloudy oil. Filtering olive oil is but a cosmetic convention employed as a means to remove all organic material that may float, or that may gather on the bottom of a bottle. Filtering is a means of having olive oil that is clear. Apparently many people want clear olive oil. Most have never/will never encounter an unfiltered olive oil.
We don’t care if our beloved olive oil is clear.
We think clear oil has been robbed of its zetz, its rusticity, a lot of vitamins, too. We prefer lots of things as unrefined as they can be. Can we say that unfiltered oil has more fragrance and therefore more flavor? Yes. Is this debatable? Yes. Again, we don’t care. We prefer unfiltered oils.
Our barrels of olive oil have ‘decanted’, which means a lot of the organic material has settled, and the result is a lot of our unfiltered oil will actually be pretty clear. No matter. It’s still unfiltered olive oil. Unfiltered olive oil is more natural than filtered. This thrills us.
Olive oil that is branded by the maker, and that has been exported in bottles and tins, has been cramped up in those bottles and tins for months. We say this is not a practice beneficial to the quality of the oil. We say these oils are stale. Tired. Oxidized. Waiting for you to buy it. However long it takes.
Olive Oil Jones olive oils (and vinegars), as a result of only having been bottled when you order it, are vastly fresher, NOT stale, NOT tired. They are living and breathing. Their fragrances billow. Their flavors run riot.
This is but one of the reasons our olive oils and vinegars are better than anything sold at retail and anything offered at online websites. We urge you to visit some of these websites and compare.
Another reason Olive Oil Jones olive oils are superior to any others is because they’re just vastly better olive oils. I have been doing this for awhile.
- Steven Jenkins