Blend across years
Mixing last season's oil into this one keeps the flavour identical and the shelves full. It also means nobody can tell you how old what they are eating is.
Home The grove
One district,
one morning
There is nothing clever in how Corella is made. It is the ordinary process, done fast, and then not messed with afterwards. Here is the whole thing.
One · the harvest
Picked cold, before the day warms up
Harvest is three weeks in May. The fruit comes off between five and nine in the morning while it is still cold, because a warm olive starts breaking down on the trailer and there is no fixing that at the press.
We pick slightly early, when a good number of the olives are still turning from green to purple rather than fully ripe. Early fruit gives less oil per tonne, which is why most growers do not do it, and it gives more of the green peppery flavour and the polyphenols that carry it. It is a straight trade of yield for taste.
The trees are the same trees every year and they are not irrigated beyond what keeps them alive in a dry spring. Stressed trees make smaller olives with more concentrated flavour.
- Harvest window
- 3 weeksMay each year
- Picked between
- 5–9amwhile fruit is cold
- Tree to press
- < 6 hrssame morning
- Grown in
- 1district, no blending
Two · the press
Twelve minutes down the road
The press is close enough that the fruit picked at dawn is oil before lunch. Whole olives go in, stone and all, get crushed and then spun to separate the oil from the water and the paste. Nothing is heated. No solvents, no filtering through anything that would strip the flavour out with the sediment.
Each day's picking is pressed as its own run. That sounds like a small detail and it is the reason a bad patch of fruit cannot be quietly averaged into the good stuff. If a run is not right we sell it as cooking oil under a different name and it never goes in a Corella tin.
The Lemon and the Chilli are made in the same press on the same day, with whole lemons or whole birdseye chillies going in with the olives. That is what agrumato means and it is why they taste like the fruit rather than like an extract.
Three · the tin
Dated as it goes in
The oil settles for a few days in sealed steel under nitrogen, so no air gets to it, then goes straight into tins. The harvest month is printed as part of that run, which means it cannot be applied later or left off.
We use tin rather than glass for one reason: light is what destroys olive oil fastest. A clear bottle sitting under shop lighting is losing flavour every day it waits for someone to buy it. Tin blocks all of it, and it happens to be lighter to post and impossible to smash.
500ml is deliberate too. It is about what a household gets through in two months, which is the window where the oil is at its best. If you cook with it every day, buy the 3 litre drum and decant into a pourer instead.
Four · the rules
Things we have decided not to do
Most of what makes olive oil worse is done for good commercial reasons. These are the ones we have chosen to wear the cost of instead.
Ship it in glass
Clear bottles photograph beautifully and let light in. We would rather the oil arrive tasting right than look good on a shelf we do not control.
Stay in stock all year
There is one harvest. When a pressing sells out the page says so, which costs us orders every spring and is the only honest option.
Pick late for the yield
Riper fruit gives noticeably more oil per tonne. It also gives a flatter, softer oil, so we take the smaller number.
2026 harvest, in the tin now
Try it
for $32
Three 100ml tins — Robust, Delicate and Lemon — which is enough of each to taste them properly and work out which one belongs in your kitchen.