Your olive oil should taste different this year

October 05 2026
3 min reading time

Supermarket olive oil is engineered to taste the same every year. Ours cannot, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.

Nobody is surprised when a wine from one year tastes different from the next. That is the whole point of a vintage. Olive oil works exactly the same way and almost nobody says so, which is strange, because olive oil is the fresher product of the two. A bottle of wine can wait a decade. Oil cannot wait a year.

The sameness is the product

Buy the same supermarket extra virgin two years running and it will taste identical. That is not luck. It is blending: oils from different countries, different farms and different seasons are combined until the result hits the flavour that sold last year. The industry calls this consistency, and as an engineering goal it is perfectly sensible.

What it costs you is the answer to a simple question: where is this from? Look at the back label of a cheap blend and you will often find the phrase “oils from the EU and non-EU”. That is not a mistake or a loophole. It is an honest admission that the oil in your hand could come from almost anywhere, and that next year’s batch may come from somewhere else entirely.

One estate, which is a constraint as much as a boast

Our oil comes from the Hermes Dimarakis estate in Ermioni, on the Argolis peninsula. The current stock is the 2025/2026 harvest. The olives are picked by hand, the oil is cold-extracted below 27 °C and it is sealed in tin within hours of coming off the trees.

This is the part people expect us to frame as a flex, and half of it is. We can tell you whose trees these are. The other half is less flattering: when a season is difficult, we have no way to hide it. A small harvest stays small. We cannot blend our way out of a thin year, because there is nothing else in the building to blend it with.

What the weather actually does

Rain in spring decides how much fruit a tree can carry. Heat in late summer decides how much oil is left inside that fruit. Then the picking date decides the rest, and we pick early, while the olives are still green.

A green olive gives less oil than a ripe one, but the oil is sharper and carries more phenolic compounds. A hot, dry growing season tends to produce a more peppery oil. A mild, wet one gives something rounder and more fruity. None of this is a dial we get to turn.

It is also why the two varieties are not simply two recipes. Koroneiki is the peppery one that holds up in a pan and in the oven. Manaki is softer and more almond-like, which is why it belongs on a salad. Same estate, same season, and still two genuinely different oils.

Buy a year at a time

Oil is at its best in the first year after pressing. That single fact should shape how you buy it, and it is the reason we sell half-litre tins rather than three-litre drums. A small tin gets used while the oil is still worth using. A drum gets opened in January and is still half full in June, by which point you are cooking with something that used to be good.

The tin does the rest of the work. Light and oxygen are what ruin olive oil, and aluminium lets through exactly none of the first. A clear glass bottle under the strip lights of a supermarket aisle lets through plenty. The tin is also plastic-free inside, recyclable, and hard to break, which matters more than it sounds when the alternative is glass on a tiled floor.

So if it tastes different, that is the system working

Open this year’s tin and you may find it is not quite last year’s oil. Good. It means the oil came from somewhere specific, from a known set of trees, in a particular autumn, and that nobody adjusted it afterwards to meet a target.

The 2025/2026 harvest is in tins now. It will not taste like this again.