5 Things You Should Know About Our Olive Oil (Family Blend N.1)
May 07, 2026
We get a lot of questions. How is your olive oil different from [X] brand at the grocery store? Why does it cost more? When will it be available?
Here are five honest answers about our original Family Blend (N.1).
None of them involve a squeeze bottle.
Fact 01
It comes from exactly 800 trees. That's the whole supply chain.
Not a region. Not a co-op. Not "sourced from farms across Italy." Our olives come from one orchard in southeastern Sicily, farmed by the same family (us) since 1916. 800 trees. One harvest a year. When it sells out, there isn't more until next September or October. That's not a scarcity tactic, it's just how olives work (and what makes them so magical).
Fact 02
It's a blend. But not the kind that should make you nervous.
Most supermarket olive oil is blended from multiple countries and multiple harvests, made from whichever oils were cheapest that season. Ours is made of three Sicilian cultivars, grown on the same hillside and pressed on the same day. Our frantoio (olive press) is our neighbor. The supply chain is short. Our family has been making this same blend since 1916, and many of the trees in the region have been cultivated there for much longer, some more than 1,000 years.
Our olives:
- Biancolilla: Light and a little fruity — the brightness you notice first
- Nocellara Messinese: Grassy, substantial — holds the whole thing together
- Tonda Iblea: The pepper at the back of your throat — a sign of high polyphenols and an early harvest
Fact 03
It was harvested early. Less oil = better oil.
Most commercial producers wait for full ripeness because ripe olives give you more oil per kilo due to higher water content in the fruit. We harvest earlier, when the polyphenols are highest and the flavor is sharpest. You end up with less oil from the same olives. One taste will show you which olive oil is noticeably better and more potent. The peppery finish isn't a quirk. It's what real early-harvest olive oil tastes like.
Fact 04
Check the harvest date, not just the expiration date.
Olive oil doesn't last forever. It doesn't go bad in a dangerous way, but eventually, it goes flat: dull, greasy and flavorless. Most bottles tell you the expiration date, which is almost meaningless if you don't know when it was made. We put the harvest date on every bottle. Ours ships shortly after pressing. Use it within a year of that date, and you'll taste the difference.
Fact 05
We're small. That's not going to change.
Pegaso started because of our family's love of Sicily and great olive oil. We love sharing it with the world, but the whole idea is to keep it small. Staying small means we know exactly which trees every bottle comes from. It means higher quality. No mass-produced olive oil can say the same. Good things take time, we've had 107 years of practice, and we're not in a hurry now.
The fastest way to understand what we're talking about is to taste it!
