Juicy Raw. Live.
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Whole, fresh-pressed olive juice. Not processed, not stored, not tamed for timid taste buds. Olives traditionally hand-harvested by families in the heart of Spain’s own rugged highland biosphere reserve, juiced days ago in a carbon neutral village mill, and brought straight to Scotland. The real deal.
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Fresh Tastier. Healthier.
As the nights get long and dark, an emerald sun rises over the Med. The countdown begins to the olive oil harvest, fresh and green as coming spring. The dregs of last year’s oil have faded with the landscape. When the new season’s press begins, people throw away what remains - or send it abroad. Most oil in UK stores is a year or years old. Even expensive gourmet oils rarely reach us quickly. But oil loses flavour from the day it's pressed, and by the time it's a year old it has lost most of the healthy, delicious polyphenols that do us so much good.
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Crude No Filter.
Cloudy whole olive juice must be used fresh. To keep oil for a year or more, it’s necessary to filter out every swirl of fruit. But filtering removes fresh green flavour, and many of the polyphenols. We source fresh, unfiltered oil while the season lasts, and freeze the brightest, greenest, healthiest early-harvest pressing to see us through the summer months. No one else guarantees such freshness.
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JFC oil is from a very special place
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Most olive oil is produced on large farms which roll across the relatively flat ‘central belt’ of Andalucia. Here machinery can be used and orchards can be irrigated. Pollutants can leach through the valleys, and there is little room for nature. But our oil comes from the Biosphere Reserve of the Sierra de las Nieves, in the pristine heart of the Andalusian highlands. There, oil is produced in small batches on tiny family-owned, flower-filled olive groves. The steep groves, which grow with uncultivated wild land, are remote and inaccessible to large machinery. The centenarian trees in the ancient groves are not irrigated. Their deep roots extract minerals and nutrients from the limestone bedrock famous for producing the most flavoursome oil. The harsh weather conditions - baking hot in summer and very cold on winter nights - produces extra polyphenols in the fruit (more than 1100mg per litre, by far the highest quantity found in any oil on sale in the UK), which means extra flavour in the oil. The groves are surrounded by virgin forest of Aleppo pine, which act as natural barriers to pests, pollution, and erosion, making pesticide and fertiliser uneccessary.
JFC olives are harvested by hand
Then they're pressed in a little mill in the village of El Burgo. The mill is carbon neutral - all byproducts are recycled: olive pits are converts to energy to run the mill. Not a stray olive leaf is wasted. The miller, Cristobal, lives in the family home above the mill. He was born there, but is a tech geek who has worked tirelessly to optimise his oil. Virgin olive oil must by law have acidity levels below 0.8 percent. Cris gets his down to an astonishing rock bottom 0.1. His mother is a famous local beauty, said to be made eternally youthful by her olive oil. Through the winter Cris is always busy, as each of the families from the village arrives to feed their harvest through his press.
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JFC has a short, ethical supply chain
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El Burgo is a lovely village in a stunning place, but it is much poorer and less recognised than it deserves to be. JFC comes straight to Edinburgh from the village. We found it, we import it, and we sell it. We have seen and shared the hard labour of the harvest, and we will always pay a fair price. No profit is creamed off by layers of middlemen or marketeers.
