Grocery Store Olive Oil Doesn’t Come From a Farm. Ours Does.

Here is an uncomfortable truth about the olive oil aisle: most of the brands on it do not farm. They are marketing companies. They buy bulk oil from brokers — oil of mixed origins, mixed ages, and mixed quality — blend it to a house profile, and pour it into bottles designed to look like they came from a hillside estate.

The hillside is a stock photo. The estate does not exist.

Posterino is the other kind of olive oil. Our family planted itself in San Procopio, in the province of Reggio Calabria, generations ago. The brothers Rocco, Rolando, and Michele Posterino built the frantoio — the mill — in the 1950s, and the family has grown, harvested, and pressed its own olives ever since. The olives are picked by hand and milled within hours, on the same land where they ripened.

When you pour Posterino, you are pouring the work of one farm — because unlike most bottles on the shelf, there actually is one.