Tour Bondolio - California Olive Growers

Bondolio Farm Tours
Olives for all of us.

Recipes Shop Olive Oils

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BY APPOINTMENT ONLY

Tours of the Bondolio farm and mill are offered by appointment only. You’ll receive a tour of our farm, our grove with its lovely trees (if not raining), our mill, and of course our indoor tasting room. Many folks tell us our tasting is the best and that they’ve never experienced another like ours.

While we can usually accommodate most tours, Bondolio is a family-run farm and we respectfully ask that you request your tour at least a month prior to the preferred date.

Pricing

Tour $30 per person, which includes $30 credit towards the purchase of Bondolio products.

Tour and Pizza (10 person minimum) $50 per person, which includes $30 credit towards the purchase of Bondolio products and $20 credit for pizza. If you have 10 people or more, we will be happy to light our outdoor pizza oven and make authentic wood-fired pizza for everyone. Our oven is a real Tuscan clay wood oven and it takes 24 hours to bring it up to proper firing temperature.

To schedule a tour, please call call Karen at 916-715-9007 or send an email to orders@bondolio.com.

Other ways to visit

The farm is open to the public every year on the second Sunday in December. Come celebrate the Harvest, taste our fresh-milled oil, and enjoy a made-to-order, wood-fired pizza on the patio.

Even if you you can’t visit us in person, you can take a virtual tour below. Watch the video and learn more about our old world farming methods and beautifully engineered Italian mill.

Join Us for Our Annual Olio Nuovo Celebration

On the second Sunday in December every year, we celebrate the first of the harvest with our olio nuovo, the new oil. As the olives change from their brightly colored green to a softer, less flashy shade with multi colors of rose, purple and black, we start harvesting.

We harvest by hand (rapidly becoming a lost art in California) when the olives are just right, and they go from tree to bottle in less than 90 minutes. Because the “new oil” has yet to settle down, the taste profile is fruity, buttery, and delightfully green and peppery on the palate. Each year we bottle a very limited amount of this seasonal gift.

You can be a part of the Olio Nuovo celebration.

Free tastings with Karen and Malcolm makes from-scratch pizza in our wood-fired outdoor oven to raise funds for Angel Flight West.

We also have a thoughtfully curated selection of gourmet food items and unique gifts…just in time for your holiday entertaining and giving. We’ll even help you assemble the perfect gift basket for your favorite foodie or to say thank you to someone for their hospitality.

No appointment needed for this event! Visit our Facebook page for more information as Harvest draws near.

Growing, Harvesting, and Milling

Here’s a video and more information about our sustainable growing practices, gentle harvest-by-hand, and organic milling at the farm.

Take an up-close look at the olive harvest at our farm. Here are some things to watch for:

Open centers in the trees. Careful pruning allows sunlight and air to circulate and encourages healthy growth. We love our trees and Malcolm is meticulous about pruning.
The water tower and irrigation lines. Olive trees are quite happy in our semi-arid Californian climate. They only need a sip of water every so often to produce fat olives.
Hand picking. We are gentle with our trees and their olives. Hand picking is labor intensive, but we don’t shake our trees or use machines to harvest because it causes stress and bruising. (Also, see note above about how much we love our trees.)
The long building on the right. This houses our mill, where we cold-press and bottle the oil at our farm. Olives go from branch to mill in 90 minutes and, during harvest, the air smells so fresh and green!
The mill itself. The gorgeous Molinova mill is A+ engineering from Pieralisi. It takes our olives from start to finish, without needing heat or chemicals to extract the oil. The end result is clear, pure, organic Bondolio.

All those beautiful olives! Our signature Sicilian flavor profile – what Karen calls “the smile taste” – is a balance of grassy Nocellara, peppery Cerasuola, and wonderfully buttery Biancollila olives.
And for fun…if you watch carefully at the beginning, you can see the big bike sculpture in the Bondolio grove.