Fact Sheet - Connoisseurs Collection - Casa Sola
Casa Sola is a fine Tuscan oil from the heart of the Chianti region.
Use this half litre bottle when you want the robust taste of a single estate Chianti olive oil.
It has all the complex flavours that you would expect from a fine Tuscan oil. It is not too harsh or peppery and its slightly bitter flavour makes it a favourite oil for summer salads. |
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 True to the tradition of Tuscan oil, indescribably flavoursome.
The Casa Sola farm lies down a long un-surfaced road in the depths of the Chianti hills and nestles in among rich fields of olives and vines.
We were welcomed by a man who was unmistakably a working farmer, he wore a dark blue work shirt and tough working trousers as he stepped down from a throbbing dusty red tractor.
Tullio is a small compact man but when he grasps your hand to shake it you feel the pleasure of hands that have worked hard and the careful strength of his muscular arms.
His eyes twinkle and dance like the early morning sunshine on olive leaves moving in a delicate breeze.
His family have been tenant farmers in this house for over a hundred years. They have seen many different land-owners live in the big house. Before Tullio’s family came here in the 1800s Casa Sola was a lonely farmhouse on a much larger estate till the three brothers who owned the estate decided to split it. So a large house was built adjoining the farmhouse for one of the brothers to live in.
Today the house and the farmhouse still stand locked together, neither has been restored but they have been maintained as houses should, so this must be one of the few Chianti farms that has never fallen either into disrepair in the past hundred years nor into the hands of foreign tourists in the past fifty.
They make fine wines from many hectares of the Sangiovese grape and make an Olive Oil of superb traditional quality.
Tullio and his son look after about 4,500 olive trees and say that they are still recovering from the big freeze in 1985 when the trees were decimated by a sudden arctic storm that dropped temperatures so low that the sap froze and the olive trees had to be radically cut back to save them. In 1986 they made just over a hundred litres of oil, but they are back to near full production and now make over 2,000 litres each year.
The olives are harvested by hand, pressed in a nearby mill and stored in the cellars in terra cotta vats with wood lids. It’s a wonderful oil offered to us by a true farming family that have worked this land and cultivated these olives for over a century.
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