An old olive tree on a hillside at first light, mist in the valley behind.

Olive oil for British tables · First bottles early 2027

Trees that have watched the centuries pass.

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The story

Old trees, and the long line of people who tended them.

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Hear first when the bottles reach Britain, in early 2027.

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The trunk of an old olive tree, twisted like rope.

I — The trees

Long before us, there were the trees.

An olive tree does not hurry. It can stand for centuries, and the oldest of them stop growing upwards and begin to turn on themselves, their trunks twisting like rope, splitting, hollowing, and still coming into leaf each spring.

In the hills of Tuscany there are trees that were already old when Dante was writing. They have outlasted droughts and plagues and the feuds of city-states, and they have been tended all that while by people who planted knowing they would not see them grow.

A grandfather plants. A grandson harvests. The tree sees them both.

II — The witnesses

What the trees have seen.

Through all of it the trees went on bearing fruit, and the people who lived among them went on pressing it and pouring it over warm bread. The recipes changed. The languages changed. The borders were redrawn more times than anyone could count. The gesture did not.

c. 600 BC
The Etruscans
Among the first to press olives in central Italy, some two and a half thousand years ago.
1st century
The Romans
Oil travelled in amphorae to every corner of the empire, Britain included.
6th–8th century
The Lombards
Kingdoms rose and fell around the groves. The groves were tended still.
c. 1300
Dante
Some of the olive trees standing in Italy today were already old.
2027
A table in Britain
The same gesture as ever: oil poured over warm bread.

Olive oil poured from a small jug over a torn loaf on a wooden table.

Olive oil is not really a product. It is a thread.

It runs from very old hands to yours, and from yours to the hands of people who do not yet exist. We are only holding it for a while.

III — The name

Lontano.

/lon-ˈtah-noh/ — Italian, adjective and adverb.

In Italian, lontano means distant, or far away. But it carries something English does not quite catch: a softness, a reaching across.

The journey of olive oil, from a tree planted in a century we cannot precisely name to a kitchen table in Britain on a Tuesday night, is a journey across a kind of distance that has no proper word in any language.

Lontano is the word for that distance, and for the act of crossing it carefully, without breaking the thing being carried.