Our mill
The heart of taste and community
The Mill in Paciano has been the heart of the Umbrian oleiculture for more than 50 years. For generations, olive farmers have been producing every autumn their greatest treasure: their olives. Then it’s time for the big moment, when the harvest shall be pressed to produce olive oil and the farmers can reap the fruits of their passionate work.
However, the mill means a lot more. It’s the heart of the community. This is where people get together, have a chat, talk about anything and everything – and of course about the best olive oil. It is - to put it another way - the second market of Paciano. That’s how the mill carried out its duty, until we had to recognise that it was getting quite old. You can surely guess what happened next.
The best product out of top-quality olives
Since we became olive farmers ourselves, we decided to buy and modernise the mill, to produce our top-quality Italian olive oil. We wanted to pursue the tradition of oil making and to find a way to repay a community that had welcomed us warmly. The result is something to be proud of: a state-of-the-art mill that produces the best Italian olive oil for food lovers like you. The brand BUTTINALE 73 is our new beginning.
Reaching the taste step by step
Harvesting requires hardworking hands and passion. That’s because we harvest our olives in a traditional way. But it’s not the tradition that’s to be shaken up, only the trees – and this in order to harvest our top-quality olives.
With our family and our team, we begin to work in the grove at the crack of dawn. On smaller trees, picking is done exclusively by hand. The larger trees, on the other hand, are harvested by shaking them vigorously, so that the olives fall on the net right under the tree. Afterwards, we carefully collect the olives in boxes and take them to the mill as quickly as possible.
We then pour the olives in a stainless-steel hopper and weigh them. A conveyor belt brings the olives to some kind of a wind machine to remove the leaves. They are cleaned and ground, including the pit, into a paste. This mixture – containing the best of nature – is kneaded, stirred and mixed. In the end a centrifuge removes the water remaining in the oil.
At this point we pour our fresh – still green and cloudy – olive oil in tank containers. After resting for a while, it is then filtered in our state-to-the-art system and it turns into liquid gold. And finally, we fill your bottles and send them to you.
In order to maintain the qualities of our olives, the process – from harvesting to pressing – lasts less than 24 hours and happens in closed chambers at a maximum of 27°C. After so much work, passion and technical precision, it’s always impressive to taste the first drops of our top-quality extra virgin olive oil in the mill. It’s a special moment with a taste explosion. Molto gustoso!
