Tenuta del Barone di Montemurlo — Tuscan extra virgin olive oil
Frantoiano di Montemurlo
On these hills the Frantoio — the most widespread cultivar in Tuscany — has been grown long enough to become something slightly different, with a name of its own.
A variety named after a place
Olive cultivars adapt: the same variety planted in two different valleys, over a few centuries, develops differences in leaf shape, yield and cold resistance. When those differences settle, the local variety earns a name.
That is what happened here with Frantoio, the cultivar that forms the backbone of almost every Tuscan oil: on the hills of Montemurlo it became Frantoiano di Montemurlo.
What it brings to the oil
Medium fruitiness with grassy notes, artichoke, green almond. Bitterness and pepper present but never aggressive, and above all good body: this is the cultivar that gives structure, the one the others lean on.
On its own it makes a complete but slightly predictable oil. That is why Tuscan tradition plants it alongside Moraiolo, which brings firm bitterness, and Leccino, which sweetens and rounds off.
Why here
The hills between Prato and Pistoia sit between two and four hundred metres, with thin stony soils and Monteferrato as a windbreak. These are hard conditions for a tree: little water, stones, wind only partly stopped.
A tree that struggles makes fewer olives, smaller and more concentrated. It is no accident that olive growing around here never aimed at quantity.
In our grove
Frantoiano, Moraiolo and Leccino grow mixed together and are picked together, not kept apart to be blended later. The balance is born in the mill rather than in a tank: what is called a field blend.
The estate journal
All oils