Sierra del Conde

The 5-litre PET bottle in particular has earned a permanent place in professional kitchens over the years.

That makes perfect sense. In a restaurant, olive oil is not only used to finish a plate with three decorative drops. Litres go into dressings, sauces, marinades, vegetables, fish, meat and hot preparations.

You need quality, but the cost per litre also has to make sense. And that is exactly where Sierra del Conde is exceptionally strong.

We are not going to dress it up. Sierra del Conde will not win a packaging design award. The large PET bottle in particular looks a little as if the packaging department took the afternoon off.

But perhaps that is part of its charm. With this oil you are clearly not paying for heavy glass, gold foil, a wooden box or a creative agency that spent three months discussing the label.

The money is in the olive oil. And for a product that can be used by the tens of litres in professional kitchens, we actually think that is an excellent starting point.

With an affordable olive oil, many people automatically assume that quality must have been sacrificed somewhere. That is exactly why the analysis of Sierra del Conde is so interesting.

A recent analysis measured an acidity of just 0.21%. For comparison, the legal maximum for extra virgin olive oil is 0.8%. Around 482 mg/kg of polyphenols were also measured.

The peroxide value in that analysis was 13.8 mEq O₂/kg, comfortably within the limit for extra virgin olive oil.

Analysis values are always a snapshot of a specific harvest or batch and may change with a future harvest.

With premium olive oil we often talk about early harvests, exclusive groves, hand-numbered bottles and international awards. Wonderful – and we love those oils too.

But there is another kind of quality: an olive oil that is good enough to use generously every single day, without calculating the cost per millilitre before every pour.

Sierra del Conde is exactly that sort of oil. Not our most exclusive bottle, but in terms of flavour, technical quality, versatility and price, perhaps one of the smartest.

Sierra del Conde is not a single-cultivar olive oil but a blend. Naturvie combines Picual, Arbequina, Cornezuelo, Frantoio and Verdial.

That partly explains why it is so versatile. Arbequina brings softness and fruit, Picual adds more structure, while the other cultivars contribute extra green aromas and nuance.

The goal is not to make one cultivar shout as loudly as possible. Its strength lies precisely in the whole: an approachable yet clearly flavourful extra virgin olive oil for everyday use.

Naturvie makes Sierra del Conde from healthy olives harvested directly from the tree. The fruit is milled on the same day.

That may sound less spectacular than a limited Grand Cru, but it matters particularly with an affordable everyday olive oil. Good fruit, rapid processing and careful work in the mill ultimately form the basis of a good extra virgin olive oil.

The 500 ml bottle is ideal for discovering Sierra del Conde at home or whenever you simply want a good all-round extra virgin olive oil without moving straight into the highest price bracket.

The 5-litre PET is the workhorse version. For restaurants, enthusiastic home cooks, large families or anyone who uses olive oil the southern European way: not carefully dripping it, but using it as a proper ingredient.

Sierra del Conde is not designed to be admired for twenty minutes before the cap comes off. It is an olive oil to use. Generously. At home or professionally. If you mainly want a reliable, flavourful and affordable extra virgin olive oil, this gives you a remarkable amount of quality for your money.

Acidity in olive oil has nothing to do with a sour taste. It is a chemical quality parameter that, among other things, gives information about the condition of the olives and how carefully they were processed.

Anyone who wants to understand the numbers behind extra virgin olive oil can find a detailed explanation of acidity, peroxide values and other laboratory measurements in the Olijfolie Academie.