[Tenuta del Barone di Montemurlo](https://www.oliodelbarone.com/en) — Tuscan extra virgin olive oil # The estate A family farm on the hills of Montemurlo, between Prato and Pistoia. A few hundred trees, picked by hand, and a mill eight hundred and seventy metres away. ## Where we are The hills of Montemurlo lie between Prato and Pistoia, at the foot of Monteferrato: a narrow band between two and four hundred metres, where the plain rises abruptly and the soil turns thin and stony. It is land for olive trees more than for anything else. Our grove is on Via Baronese, at Riva di Bagnolo. The street takes its name — and so do we — from Villa del Barone, a Renaissance house at Bagnolo di Sopra that gives its name to this whole stretch of hillside. ## How we work We prune and pick by hand, tree by tree, between October and November. By hand is not a romantic choice: olives do not bruise, and a bruised olive starts oxidising before it even reaches the mill. Olives picked in the morning leave for the mill the same afternoon. They never spend a night in the crate — and you can taste that in the bitterness and the pepper of new oil. ## We sell it ourselves Tenuta del Barone di Montemurlo is a sole-proprietor farm business owned by Nicolò Coppi, registered in Prato. The oil is bought here, straight from the person who makes it: no middlemen, no warehouse where it waits for months. We ship within Italy, across the European Union and worldwide, in shock-proof packaging. Anyone passing through is welcome to collect it. ## What we do not claim We are not a certified organic farm and we do not use the Tuscan PGI designation: we do not hold them, and claiming them without holding them would be dishonest as well as illegal. What we can say, and what anyone can check, is where the trees grow, when we pick, how far the olives travel and where they are milled. That is what an oil is judged on, far more than a label. [All oils](https://www.oliodelbarone.com/en)