Father & son

We pick it ourselves. Then we bring it to you.

Most olive oil brands buy from brokers. Some buy from a mill. A few work with a named farm. We are the farm — five generations on the same hillside near Izmir, and the people who decide when to pick.

That is the whole reason Nifolia exists. Not as a marketing angle, but because we could not find oil in Australia that tasted like the oil we grew up with, and we already had the trees.

At harvest — Omer and Kiahn

I set the harvest date, which is the single decision that determines what the oil will taste like and how much of it there will be. Pick early and green and you get bitterness, pepper, higher polyphenols and considerably less oil per tonne. Pick late and ripe and you get volume and a milder, rounder oil.

Kiahn and I fly over together for it, and we do the work ourselves. Picking and pruning run back to back and together they take two to three months. The fruit goes to the mill the same day it is picked, because olives begin to ferment the moment they leave the tree.

Poyraz, a licensed facility in the Aegean, presses and cans it under our label to export standard. They do not source the fruit and they do not blend it. That is the entire chain: our trees, one mill, one family, you.

The rest of the year

When the pruning is finished we fly back to Australia. Family on the land handle the basic maintenance while we are away — keeping the grass down and fertilising when the trees need it.

We do not irrigate. The grove has never been irrigated, and the trees live on what the hillside gives them. That means less oil per tonne in a dry year, and more concentrated fruit for it.

In Australia — Kiahn

My son Kiahn is the fifth generation, and he is the one you will actually meet. He runs Nifolia here — the markets, the tastings, the emails, the deliveries around Melbourne. If you write to us, he is who writes back.

He did not grow up in the hills, but the land is his as much as mine — he works the harvest beside me every season, so he can tell you what the pick date was and why.

Why we will tell you the unflattering things too

Our current batch tests at 16.96 mg CAE of total polyphenols per 100ml — roughly 185 mg/kg. That is a respectable mid-range figure, and it is not a high-polyphenol oil. We could simply not mention it. We would rather print it on the tin.

Next season we intend to pick a portion of the grove earlier and greener specifically to raise that number, and we will publish the result whichever way it goes.