Finca De La Horca
Finca de la Horca, 12
04270 Sorbas, Almería,
Spanien
+34 642 50 74 59
Olive Oil
When the olive harvest starts on our finca, everything revolves around the trees and their fruit for a few weeks. During this time, almost everything else is put on hold – out into the grove in the morning, back home with full crates in the afternoon. The harvest period usually stretches over around three weeks – an intense time that can be quite exhausting.
We harvest our olives entirely by hand – without large machines, so the trees are treated as gently as possible.
A typical harvest day looks like this:
First, we spread out large olive nets under each tree.
Then we prune the branches that need cutting anyway, and they fall onto the net.
In addition, we harvest olives directly from the tree – either by hand or with small plastic rakes (originally children’s rakes) that let us “comb” the branches very gently.
All olives eventually end up in small crates, which are loaded into the car.
At a central spot, these small crates are then poured into a large olive box (bulk crate), one after the other.
Ripeness, varieties & flavour
We harvest our olives later in the season, because we prefer a mild, smooth olive oil. On the finca we have several different varieties – a mix of typical Andalusian olives, including Picual, Hojiblanca, Arbequina and Lechín, which have been growing here for many years.
Our oil is therefore not a single-variety oil, but a cuvée of all the trees on the finca. This
diversity creates a harmonious, well-balanced flavour.
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Our own batch at the mill
Bit by bit, the large olive boxes fill up with olives from the small crates. Once two of these boxes are full, we have roughly more as the minimum of 500 kg of olives needed for the mill to process our olives as a separate batch – and it is from
exactly this fruit that our finca olive oil is made.
At the mill: from fruit to oil
After Roland has loaded the full crates onto the trailer, we head to a nearby olive mill.
There, the olives are:
1. unloaded by a mill employee
2. tipped onto the feed grate into the receiving hopper,
3. moved from there along a conveyor belt,
4. cleared of the remaining leaves and twigs,
5. a staff member prepares a bag with our name on it to take a handful of olives from the belt for quality assessment,
6. the lady in quality control then places our olives into a ring,
7. which is then put into a scanner that evaluates the quality,
8. in the meantime, the olives continue along the belt, are cleaned, crushed and processed cold,
9. after the pressing process, the resulting extra virgin olive oil is filled into 5-litre canisters and packed into boxes for transport home. From then on, we take over again.
Bottling on the finca
Back on the finca, the fine-tuning begins:
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We bottle the oil in different sizes, for example
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500 ml bottles
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250 ml bottles
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special gift bottles
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Every bottle is labelled.
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Each closure has a safety ring that clearly snaps open the first time the bottle is used.
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​In addition, we seal the neck of the bottle with a shrink capsule, so everything is clean, secure and visually appealing.
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This is how the oil in the can becomes a finished product, ready to be sold or given as a gift.
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We’re delighted if you, too, get to enjoy our oil and bring a little piece of our finca into your kitchen.