Tour Bondolio - California Olive Grove

Bondolio Olive Grove 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 will receive a tour of our farm including our outdoor patio, our 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.

Pricing:

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

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

Please call 916-715-9007 or email at kbond@cedaron.com.

Requests for a tour should be made at least a month prior to the requested date.

If you can’t make it out to visit you can still learn about our harvesting and milling on the farm!

Join Us for Our Annual Olio Nuovo Celebration

On the first two Sundays 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. No appointment needed for this event!

Harvesting and Milling

If you can’t make it out to see us, here’s a video and more information that shares our harvest and 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.