Hand picked premium olives, exclusively from the Alhambra Valley Ranch’s own olive groves, yield superior quality, cold pressed, extra virgin olive oil. Grown with sustainable farming practices (organically), our oil is perfect for cooking, salad oil or just for bread dipping. I hope you enjoy our oil, as much as we enjoyed growing the olives and bringing it to market.

Tom Powers, Farmer & Producer

The Cycle

Our Leccino and Frontoio olive trees are gourmet varieties from Tuscany, Italy. Our trees blossom from April through May of each year. Following pollination, small olives begin to appear. Some olives do not progress further, but those that do are defined by June. The olive fruit continues to grow, gaining in size and weight into October. The oil content of the olive begins to increase from August to harvesting, which begins in October to December but sometimes, like 2010-2011 season, into February. We usually begin picking (green olives) in October and continue picking from mid-November into January when the olives turn from green, to red and then to black when they are the ripest. We carefully monitor the batches we pick so as to produce oil that is crisp, light and peppery. Extra Virgin Olive Oil is know for its low acidity (IOOC standard of below 0.8%) and our oil consistenty rates superior to the minimun international standard at 0.13%.

Immediately after picking we take the olives to Nick Sciabica and Sons, in Modesto, CA, for custom pressing in their hammermill press. This company has been in the olive oil business since 1934 and our olives are well known to the workers at Sciabica’s. We and Sciabica workers insure storage is in proper conditions in a cool area in stainless before bottled. We take delivery of the bottles oil as soon as it is completed. We do not mix our oil with other oils and only do a first, cold pressing. After pressing, the oil is stored in a cool, dark place in stainless steel vats so if can settle, as we do not filter our oil. After about two months the oil is racked off, bottled, labeled and made ready for delivery.

In October to November some of the larger green and red olives are saved for curing. These olives we process with brining slowly removing the natural bitterness and developing a firm, pleasant texture. Later in the harvest we dry cure olives we have allowed to tree-ripen to blackness. These olives are placed in burlap sacks with rock salt and massaged daily for about 5 weeks. These dry cured olives have a wonderful concentrated olive flavor and aroma.

All of our olives are sold with our own marinate, which contains our oil and several natural spices and herbs.

Farming Practices

We at Alhambra Valley Ranch are proud to support the guiding principles of Sustainable Agriculture: to produce abundant food without depleting the earth’s resources or polluting the environment. Our general practices are described here.

As in any orchard, soil nuturition and water availability are critical for our olive trees. We use organic fertilizers. We measure the nutrients taken from the grove by evaluating what is removed by the olive harvest. We leave the prunings in the groves, turning them to mulch after they have dried in the field. We will grow nitrogen-fixing ground cover plants and bring in our farm’s compost as an organic approach to maintaining the fertility of the soil. Our groves are carefully watered by drip irrigation durng the summer. As oil trees are drought resistant and water is a precious commodity in the Alhambra Valley, we waste no water by spray or flood irrigation.

We hope you will join us and other local farmers in supporting Sustainable Agriculture.