A question at the kitchen table.
Why Terra di Gaia exists — and why the brand carries our daughter's name.
What are we actually
putting on her bread?
Two parents, one child, one kitchen table. 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.
The bottle
that tells you nothing.
So: turn it around, read the label. A best-before date, a “bottled in Italy”. No variety, no harvest day, no number. Not a scandal — simply a nothing. You cannot find it out.
We turned many bottles around. It was written on none of them.
Jessica's home
knew the answer.
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.
Not a discovery.
A rule.
Farms, mills, pressing runs, samples — not romantic, laborious. At the end it was settled what gets accepted and what does not: we buy exclusively in the comune of Corigliano-Rossano, single-variety, by pressing window and acidity. One vintage a year, each variety pressed on its own.
We do not take everything we are offered. What we decline is governed by the same rule as what we take.
One of us only believes
what has been measured.
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.
See both oils with their values →Terra di Gaia.
The earth of Gaia.
You can read the name 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 was the reason, and she remains the measure.
“We sell nothing we
would not give her.”
Jessica & Gee · Founders of Terra di Gaia
The vintage
is allocated.
Those registered receive the new vintage first. The Letter from the Hill writes as soon as it is released.
Register for the new harvest →