Above all, quality
At ‘La Casa del Aceite’ you will find genuine top-quality extra virgin olive oils made in the most traditional of ways.
Our oils are smooth and sweet on the palate, easy to eat and pair with any food you can imagine.
They provide any meal with that special touch!
The quality if our oils is based around four factors:
- The excellent quality of the olive, the ‘Empeltre’ and ‘Arbequina’, ‘Picual’ and ‘Arroniz’ varieties.
- Modern technology enabling us to produce top quality oils.
- The human touch: we are the Gómara brothers, Mario and Martín, and we are exclusively in charge of overseeing the process to ensure only the very finest extra virgin olive oil is produced.
- Our rigour: from the very start, this has meant getting the olives to the oil press on the very day they are picked. Our olives are only picked from the trees. The olive production takes less than 24 hours and is done in the cold (less than 27ºC). We bring olive picking forward to the end of October/beginning of November. All our work is based around producing EXTRA VIRGIN OLIVE OIL, which is the highest quality and the only type we trade.
The company
‘La Casa del Aceite’ is a family-run business that was founded in 1998 in Cascante (Navarre), a region linked to olive cultivation since Roman times. In our area in the 60s there were up to some 17 oil presses.
This area has its own special climate which is ideal for producing high quality oils with the low winter and high summer temperatures. We are some 30 km from Moncayo, the highest peak in the Iberian Range (where it is not unusual to still see snow at the beginning of June) and another 30 km from the desert that is Las Bardenas. Our area lies within Queiles Valley, one of the tributaries of the Ebro, which also ensures that we are subject to our beloved wind: the ‘Cierzo’. This accumulation of circumstances means that our olive production is not especially large, but it is of the highest quality.
The olive we use comes from our olive plantations (over 200 hectares) and from around 1500 farmers in the region, mainly from Navarre, though also from the surrounding provinces of La Rioja and Aragon.
By consuming our oils, you are doing your bit to keep a rural area alive.
“While you continue to make such good oil and treat us so well, we’ll keep coming back”
For us, our customers are like family, calling to see how the harvest has gone, etc. In some cases, they come to see the oil being made and to try the just made oil on a piece of toast while chatting with the farmer who, in turn, is unloading olives… They know us personally and most of them are involved in this project, chatting about and recommending us and so on.
Our olive oil production
- Olive Reception
The farmer daily brings the olive collected to the mill. After downloading it is cleaned.
In the first place, it goes through an aventador, where both broken leaves and olive trees are removed or in poor condition. - Heavy and storage
We follow the traditional production process of extra virgin olive oil, guaranteeing the highest quality of our product.
In a second phase, the olive is passed through a washing machine to leave it clean of dirt, stones and other elements.
Once well cleaned, it is weighed and stored in the silos, where it will be until the moment of elaboration.
The objective here is that the olive does not deteriorate or ferment, since the juice of a fruit in poor condition cannot be of the same quality as that of a freshly picked fruit. - Oil extraction
Until a few years ago, this extraction was done with stone mills, first driven by animals and later with engines.
Once crushed the olive was introduced in the press, from where on the one hand the oil and the water that the olive carried was obtained, while in the press it was the bone and the skin.
The oil and water were allowed to decant and having a different density (water weighs more than oil) separated.
In recent years there has been a great development of the sector looking for two fundamental objectives: to achieve a higher quality oil and reduce pollution caused by olive residues.
