Our olive oil

The idea of offering our olive oil to people outside our own family came about in the 1990s. Until then, we had produced solely for our own use. Demand has risen so sharply since then that we have steadily increased production. But never at the expense of quality. That remains our top priority. But today we are able to offer our finest olive oil in the highest quality and in larger quantities. Not least because we have many volunteers who actively support us with the harvest and distribution.
We are a one-stop shop: the olive trees, the harvest and the sales – we take care of everything ourselves, which means we always have full control over the quality of our products, which are so dear to our hearts.

Recognising good olive oil is no easy task. As well as the challenge of identifying the right flavour, there are other difficulties posed by the vast range of olive oils available. Just consider that, in Italy alone, more olive oil is consumed each year than is produced from Italian olives. Olives for the production of Italian olive oil are now sourced not only from across Europe but from all over the world. However, the label must state the origin of the olives used to produce the oil: whether they are from the EU or from both EU and non-EU cultivation.
But how can you tell if olive oil is good? Especially now that we know that “olive oil is the most commonly counterfeited foodstuff in Europe”? The answer remains difficult, as consumers cannot draw any conclusions about the quality of the oil based on its price, colour or taste.
Increasingly, inferior oils, which have been adulterated with flavourings and colourings, are finding their way onto the market. And in some cases at a very high price, which consumers in turn associate with quality. This falsification of food is known as food fraud.  Consumers have little chance of detecting this mislabelling, and even in the laboratory, testing has not been entirely conclusive to date. A new testing method, developed by the University of Bayreuth in early 2021, might soon provide a solution.

Nevertheless, it is and remains difficult to recognise good olive oil. Buying a good, authentic Italian olive oil is, now more than ever, a matter of trust. It is therefore particularly important to us to make a high-quality product available outside Italy as well.

Our extra virgin olive oil is produced exclusively from olives grown in our family’s own olive groves and from olives from the Abruzzo. We have known all the trees, with their more than eight different olive varieties, personally, so to speak, for generations. Our motto is to make natural, high-quality olive oil from Abruzzo accessible to everyone. For decades, we have been convinced of the quality of our extra virgin olive oil from our own groves. Not just because we think it’s a truly great product, but because all of us – the entire Mirretta-Barone family – stand behind our olive oil from our family-owned olive groves with our name.

We sell our family-owned olive oil from Abruzzo because we are completely convinced of its quality. We would like to offer you a high-quality, natural, healthy and delicious product that offers excellent value for money.

Many of our customers no longer buy any other olive oil, as they are 100% convinced by the olive oil from the Mirretta-Barone family.
Try our olive oil for yourself – we look forward to hearing your thoughts!

What makes the Mirretta-Barone family’s olive oil so special? With the vast array of olive oils available on the market and the almost universal use of the ‘extra virgin’ classification, this is a question that quickly springs to mind. To understand this better, one must understand the history of our family, our olive groves and our production process.

Our olive groves in the Italian Abruzzo region have been in the family for generations and, until the late 1990s, were harvested and used solely for our own consumption. When producing olive oil for personal use, only a fraction of the trees were harvested and everything was left as it had been for generations. Whilst other olive oil producers increasingly focused on mass production, many switched to particularly high-yielding varieties. In contrast, we still have olive varieties in our fields today that are rarely found elsewhere. Some of these old, traditional varieties from our olive groves bear very few or only very small fruits and ripen very late in the year. But it is precisely this, and their varying degrees of ripeness, that give our olive oil its special character.

As we often had a bit left over when producing olive oil for our own use, we gave the surplus to our friends. Enthusiasm for our product quickly spread from our own family to our friends and their friends, who had tasted the olive oil whilst dining together. Demand grew steadily, so today we want to make this high-quality olive oil from our family’s own olive groves available to everyone.

We offer our extra virgin olive oil produced using three different methods. This means that the exact same harvest of the various varieties from our groves is used for production. However, we then extract the olive oil using three different production methods.

• „Come prima“ (traditionally cold-pressed)
• „Frentania„ (cold-extracted)
• “Ciommi” (special cold-extracted)

The different oil extraction methods are what give the oils their distinct flavours, even when made from the same blend of olive varieties.

To allow you to form your own impression of our three olive oils, we offer an olive oil tasting kit. This includes our three different olive oils in sample sizes and instructions for tasting olive oil at home. This way, you can learn to tell the difference and quickly find your personal favourite. What’s more, an olive oil tasting like this is, of course, great fun too!

We hope you too will be delighted by our “Famiglia Mirretta-Barone” extra virgin olive oil. We look forward to receiving your feedback!