Made to be used, not kept.

Gentlemen Farmers began on Via di Vacciano, twenty minutes from the Ponte Vecchio, on a hill that looks across the valley to the town of Impruneta. Climb to the top of the grove and the view turns: the Duomo, and the whole city of Florence, laid out below.

This is the home grove, the place where the idea took root ten years ago. The olives here are grown, picked and pressed the way we’ve always done it: by hand, in small lots, milled within hours, and bottled young, to be used rather than kept. It’s the same oil that has won us six gold medals, and it’s still, first of all, the oil we cook with every day.

La Luigiana is a single estate of some 30 hectares at Galluzzo, within the city of Florence itself, ten minutes from the Ponte Vecchio, yet entirely rural. Olive groves and vineyards share the land on hills that have been farmed for centuries, with the city just beyond the ridge.

Around 4,500 olive trees, predominantly Frantoio and Moraiolo, form the heart of the estate. The whole property is being rebuilt as a fully organic estate with its own press on site, so the fruit is milled within hours of picking and never leaves the land before it becomes oil.

Every choice, from soil to harvest to pressing, serves a single aim: an extra virgin olive oil of the highest quality, true to its terroir.

Built around 1427, La Sfacciata was the country house of the Vespucci, the Florentine family that gave the world Amerigo Vespucci, and America its name. The villa still carries the name it was given then: la sfacciata, “the bold faced one”, for the way it stands open and unashamed on its hillside, looking straight at Florence.

Nineteen hectares of olive grove fall away from the house towards the city. Moraiolo, Frantoio and Leccino, the three great Tuscan varieties, grow here as they have for six centuries.

Left abandoned for the past twenty five years, the grove is being brought back tree by tree, pruned, cleaned, restored, and planted where time had thinned it. Some 1,500 trees are back in production today; the young plantings will follow, so that each harvest grows a little as the estate returns to what it was.

OLEVM is our neighbour. Fattoria Montecucchi lies on the southern hills of Florence, a fold or two from Gentlemen Farmers, close enough that we share the same slope, the same light and the same friendly wave across the valley. The farm sits on an old Roman road the locals call Fattucchia, “the sorceress”, after the legends about the land’s powers, which tells you something about the place.

Where Gentlemen Farmers makes an oil for every day, OLEVM makes one for the few. A single family estate, with some of the trees centuries old and tended without chemical fertilisers or pesticides, picked by hand and cold pressed within the day, then filtered for purity and longevity.

The production is small and entirely dependent on the year, so each harvest is a limited edition. The result is a sophisticated, exclusive oil, powerfully balanced, with the bitter, spicy character of true Tuscan extra virgin, and a sign that one hill can give two very different answers.