It started with a question at the kitchen table. Two parents, one child — and the question of what we were actually putting on her bread. Every guide says olive oil is the best thing you can give a child. None of them says how to tell whether the oil on your own shelf is still worth anything.
So we turned the bottle around. There was a best-before date and “bottled in Italy”. No variety, no harvest day, no number. Not a scandal — simply a nothing. You cannot find it out. Turn your own bottle around: most of them say the same.
The place that was already there
Jessica's roots are in Rossano, on the Ionian coast of Calabria. What would have been research for anyone else was a phone call for her. The zone has its own signature variety, the Dolce di Rossano — hardly known outside Calabria, and almost impossible to find single-variety.
We went there.
A year and a half
Farms, mills, pressing runs, samples. Not romantic — laborious. At the end stood not a discovery but a rule: we buy exclusively in the comune of Corigliano-Rossano, single-variety, by pressing window and acidity.
We do not take everything we are offered. What we decline is governed by the same rule as what we take.
The proof
Gee is an engineer. He believes a statement when there is a measurement behind it — professionally suspicious of anything that is merely claimed. That is why every vintage goes to an accredited laboratory: COI method, report with a number.
The report was never meant as marketing material. It was what one of us needed in order to believe, himself, that it is true. Measured, not claimed.
The name
TERRA DI GAIA — you can read it as the Greek goddess of the Earth, the ground from which everything comes. That reading is beautiful, and it is not wrong. The true one is smaller: it is our daughter’s name.
She is the measure: we sell nothing we would not give her.