Stonegate Olive Oil

Stonegate Olives is a family owned, boutique olive grove dedicated to producing the highest quality extra virgin olive oil. Located in the fertile Bay of Plenty, New Zealand, Stonegate Olives is home to 370 trees of Greek and Italian origin. Established in 2003, the first successful press was produced in 2008. With almost 10 years perfecting the picking, cleaning and pressing process, Stonegate Olives is in full production. All of the olives are picked, cleaned and delivered to the local press – where only the first cold press is bottled. The theme of Stonegate Olives is quality over quantity, with the aim being to produce the finest quality olive oil possible. This begins with the trees themselves, which have been planted with generous spacing to ensure maximum airflow and sunlight penetration, and they are regularly pruned to ensure the best quality olives are produced. In most commercial olive groves, trees are closely planted and left to grow as large as possible to achieve the greatest volume of fruit growth – compromising the quality of the resulting oil. Our method allows for the development of far healthier trees and a far healthier orchard, ensuring our fruit has prolonged and uniform ripening. Harvest time at Stonegate Olives is another opportunity to treat our olives with care to produce the best possible oil. At Stonegate when the fruit is ready, the team can harvest very quickly – optimising the final product – an issue that can affect larger-scale olive productions. In fact, the aim is to have the fruit from Stonegate Olive’s boutique grove delivered to the press the day after picking. You can’t get much fresher than that.