Blog

  Great Taste and Great for You! Certified Extra Virgin Olive Oil, the highest quality in California, has significant health benefits. Antioxidants, polyphenols, flavonoids all mean improved taste and health. Look for the seal of certification and the harvest and mill dates. The fresher the better. The main type of fat in vegetable oils, polyunsaturated […]

  The gift of sun. The citrus at IL Fiorello are wonderful. They seem to love the sun at the farm and give us fabulous fruit. We use all of our fruit in our Kitchen in the Grove for our dinners, tasting menus, and cooking classes.   We have many varieties here on our farm. […]

    At IL Fiorello we consider olive oil competitions very important for one major reason, to make sure our oils are as good as, or better than, the rest of the oils in the world. Just last year we won 24 individual awards. It is so important to benchmark our oils with others. Medals […]

  What do we do in January at an Olive Farm and Mill?     Celebrate the New Year and say thank you to all our guests, growers, and staff! The biggest job of all!  Clean the mill Certify all our oils as Extra Virgin, done and completed – all pass with flying colors! Make […]

    A hallmark time at IL Fiorello is when all the extra virgin olive oil is finished and “put to bed” so to speak, and we can have fun making our co-milled oils. Our promise to you is that we will never make infused oils, only co-milled.  Co-milling is when we run beautiful olives […]

  IL Fiorello presents a Pet-Nat made from grapes grown in the Suisun Valley, Malvasia Bianca. Crafted into beautiful effervescent wine by local winemaker, Faith Armstrong-Foster. Faith says, “This Suisun Valley Pét-Nat is floral and fruity, but refreshingly bone-dry. The opening aromatics are like sticking your nose in a fermentation vat, with yeasty brioche notes and […]

  When the final co-milled oil is done, the mill is clean, and the weather turns cold; I know that it is time to bring out the pizzelle maker. Pizzelle are delicious, tiny, very beautiful cookies. Named because they are flat and sweet. Like little lady sweet pizzas. I have been making pizzelles since 1975, […]

  There are always so many questions about milling olives, and making extra virgin olive oil. Here is the simplified synopsis:  good fruit, meaning good olives, makes good oil!   The process Olives are delivered to the mill the same day they are harvested   2. Olives are inspected and photographed and the temperature is documented […]

  An interesting question is when to harvest olives. This seems to be an easy decision. The answer; when they are ripe. But the real answer is actually much more complicated. Before you plant an olive tree, you should understand what kind of olive oil you want to produce and what flavor do you want […]