One grove.
Six varieties.
Picked, pressed and bottled in Martinborough. Nothing blended in from anywhere else, because there is nowhere else.
Every bottle of Long Dark Sky oil comes from the trees you can see from the house. That is an unusual claim, and it is the whole point of the operation — most supermarket "extra virgin" is blended from several countries and can be a year or more old before it reaches a shelf.
Ours goes from tree to press inside a day, and into dark glass immediately afterwards. Olive oil is a fruit juice: it is at its best young, and it hates light, heat and air.
The range
Same oil, same season, three labels — each telling a different part of the story. They look rather good as a set of three.
Galactic Kiwi
The asterismNamed for the dark nebula near the core of our own galaxy that looks — unmistakably, once you have seen it — like a kiwi. Photographed from this grove.
Galactic Grove
The treesFor the grove itself — several hundred trees in long mown rows, and the fruit that ripens on them from green through rose to deep purple-black.
Galactic Tractor
The FergieFor the three 1950s Ferguson tractors that still do the work here — and for the ones that carried Ed Hillary to the South Pole.
[[TASTING_NOTES]]
Six varieties, picked together
A blend of six cultivars gives a rounder oil than any one of them alone — some bring the peppery bite at the back of the throat, some bring the soft green fruit at the front.
- Koroneiki — Greek, tiny fruit, famously high in polyphenols
- Barnea — Israeli, generous cropper, soft and fruity
- Manzanilla — Spanish, plump, the classic table olive
- Picholine — French, clean and slightly peppery
- Frantoio — Tuscan, the backbone of classic Italian oil
- Leccino — Tuscan, mild and smooth, balances the sharper ones
How it actually gets picked
A tracked machine takes hold of each trunk, opens an upturned umbrella around it, and shakes. The fruit drops into the frame and never touches the ground.
Harvest in the grove — the trunk shaker and catch frame at work.
Made properly, in small batches
The three-bottle box
All three labels in a printed kraft box that is genuinely nice to hand over — it goes down well as a corporate gift, a thank-you, or something to send offshore to family who miss the place.
We post anywhere in New Zealand. Tell us how many and where they are going and we will come back with a total.
Try it where it grew
Guests staying in the house get to taste the current pressing on bread from the oven, standing in the grove it came from. It does taste different there. We cannot explain it either.