Harvest to harvest EVOO

Guest written by Giulia Crouch

Illustration by Dóra Berczi

Photography by Sara Rainer

We’ve been trained to think of olive oil as a constant: the same bottle, the same taste, the same background nothingness. Always there and never changing. Something you grab from a shelf without thinking, the way you buy washing-up liquid. A product with no season, no story, no link to the land or the year that produced it.

This is supermarket olive oil: bland, blended and stripped of its time and place. An untethered commodity adrift on the supermarket shelves with labels that desperately try to pretend there’s a story to tell. It’s a functional fat, rather than a living ingredient – something to grease a pan with, not something to actually taste. A product to use rather than a food to enjoy.

But this is not real olive oil.

Real EVOO is a seasonal ingredient, which changes from harvest to harvest: shaped by everything that’s happened that year and more – the weather, the soil, when the olives were picked, how they were picked, how quickly they were taken to the press, the press itself. Of course the location has a huge influence: even within the same region of the same country, oil from olive trees near the coast will taste different from oil made from trees in the mountains.

All these variables accumulate and result in something deeply rooted in a place and time – just as in wine. The harvest of 2024 will be different to that of 2025 and different again in 2026, in the same way we speak about vintages. Imagine if we treated wine the way we treat olive oil: rows of identical bottles labelled simply “wine”, or “blend of wine from the EU”. What a crying shame that would be for a product so complex, something that can be such a true expression of its land and the people who made it.

Good EVOO, like wine, is nuanced, expressive, layered with flavour and alive. Bad EVOO – like all industrial food – is sad, flat and characterless.

Olives are harvested in the Mediterranean from October to January. For Juli and Tom, who founded Honest Toil 15 years ago after moving to Greece, their lives have come to revolve around this window. In fact, the whole community – based in a rural part of the Pelaponese – centres its year around the rhythm of the olive trees. 

“It gives structure to our lives in a way that nothing else does – not even the school year,” says Juli. “We needed some work done on our house one year and nobody was free from November to January because everyone was busy with their olives.”

From its conception Honest Toil was always going to be harvest-to-harvest oil – in fact they were one of the first to offer this in the UK. Simply put, this means they focus on a single harvest at a time, letting it run its course before bringing the new harvest every autumn. There’s no topping up fresh batches with previous years’ leftovers, and no selling oil once it’s past its prime. “We'd never sell a batch for more than 18 months, aiming for the very minimum shelf life of EVOO, instead of trying to extend it,” says Juli. “This has made our job a lot harder of course – in some ways we've shot ourselves in the foot. But it's helped raise awareness around EVOO being a living substance with a lifespan and I think that's valuable knowledge.”

This is the polar opposite of most supermarket olive oils, which don’t even display a harvest date, let alone abide by one. Most EVOO on supermarket shelves is a blend of oils from different places, picked at different times and mixed together, obscuring any sense of origin or season. “When oils from different timelines, regions, countries even, are mixed indifferently to hit some benchmark goal (like the 0.8% acidity for extra virgin), identities, stories and flavours are lost,” says Juli. It becomes, as she puts it, a “lifeless mass”.

While blended, industrially-made olive oils are thought of as an ambient product that can sit at the back of your pantry forever, real single-harvest EVOO, by contrast, is a fresh ingredient that should be used quickly. In fact it’s best thought of as freshly squeezed olive juice – it is, after all, the only oil pressed from the flesh of a fruit rather than chemically extracted from a seed.

But why does freshness matter? What difference does it make if you use a new-season oil compared with one that’s three years old?

Firstly, and most importantly, it’s about flavour. Like all fruit, olive oil tastes best when it’s fresh, and over time that flavour starts to degrade. Unlike wine, it doesn’t improve with age; instead its lively character begins to subdue, mellowing out over time. Once a bottle is opened and exposed to light, oxygen, and time, the delicate aroma and flavour compounds that make EVOO so captivating gradually start to fade away.

This is most noticeable on the nose. Fresh, just-harvested EVOO – particularly Honest Toil’s – smells like a field of just-cut grass on a warm, sun-dappled day. It’s alive with the scent of the plant, an almost electric zing that couldn’t be further from the flat, dull aroma of an industrially-produced oil. “It’s bright, it’s green, it’s a smell that tells you it comes from nature, not something that’s been sitting on a shelf for years,” says Juli.

On the palate, it’s herbal and smooth but distinctly peppery – a sign of another crucial element of fresh EVOO that diminishes over time: polyphenols. Polyphenols are a plant’s natural defence mechanism: compounds that protect it from damage and, when we consume them, also benefit our health. They act as antioxidants and feed our gut microbes, and they are abundant in good, fresh EVOO. Interestingly, you can taste them – that peppery, bitter, cough-inducing kick from a quality olive oil is polyphenols in action. Over time, however, their intensity wanes.

So when we talk about freshness in olive oil, it’s a win-win: peak flavour and maximum health benefits. To enjoy your EVOO at its best, store it somewhere cool and dark, and aim to use it within three to six months from when you open it. That’s not to say a year-old bottle is “bad” or unusable – it just won’t excite your palate or nourish your gut in quite the same way, and is probably put to better use in cooking rather than finishing dishes.

While some olive oil producers – even the new wave of trendy, big-budget, aspirational brands – are far removed from the orchards where the olives grow, the hard work of the harvest, and the delicate process of pressing, Tom and Juli are in the thick of it. Literally: “We’re covered in mud most of the time,” says Tom.

They live and breathe olive oil, having first learned to harvest from neighbours when they acquired their land 15 years ago. Their own grove is tiny – about 200 trees – which is normal for the region, where nearly everyone has these little “microgroves.” They buy the rest of their olives from surrounding groves and have established good relationships with the growers.

“We know where everything comes from, we know everyone by name – it’s such a close-knit community,” says Juli. “We’ve even learnt Greek, and our kids go to school here. We’re selling Greek oil from Greek farms, and we’re not trying to change it into something else.”

They want the oil to reflect its homeland – and it does.

For Juli and Tom, the connection is even more visceral. “It tastes different when you know the family that owns the press,” says Tom. “When you see the mum involved, lugging big jugs of fresh olive oil, and a cat licking it up off the floor – it all plays into it. It’s not just some shiny factory where everything’s slick and automated. It definitely tastes better when you know the context.”

“It’s the kind of EVOO,” he adds, “that you’d find under a Greek yiayia’s kitchen counter in a plastic bottle” – an everyday oil, meant for using, not just looking at. 

Pour it, don’t just drizzle; fry your chips in it like a Greek, bake it into cakes like an Italian, savour it with good bread, use it as the base for your tomato sauce, drizzle it on Greek yoghurt with honey and sea salt, sip it to marvel at all its complex flavours. Celebrate the new harvest and look forward to the next. In a world where we’re so disconnected from the seasons, single-harvest EVOO is a delicious way to seize them back and reconnect with the wonder of nature’s rhythm.

That’s the beauty of harvest-to-harvest EVOO – every bottle tells the story of its season, its place, and the people who made it.

Try Honest Toil's fresh harvest.