De Carlo

The first historical documents testifying to the De Carlo family's oil business date back to 1600. For over five centuries, the De Carlo family has been cultivating olive groves, harvesting the olives that grow in the most fertile soils of the Bitritto area by hand and processing them with traditional systems to produce an extra virgin olive oil of unquestionable quality.

The history of the De Carlo family is closely linked to the history of their land and olive groves: through the historical documents preserved in the Bitritto archives, it has been possible to reconstruct the various steps that led Grazia, her husband Saverio, their children Marina and Francesco and their son-in-law Arturo to continue work that began several centuries ago. A concrete testimony to the family history is the seventeenth-century oil mill dug into the rock, recently recovered and restored.

There are two main estates where the olives used in the production of De Carlo's extra virgin olive oil are grown and harvested: the historic Torre di Mossa estate and the Arcamone estate, where olive trees have been grown and treated according to the principles of organic farming since 1990. We are in the area of Bitritto, about 10 km from Bari, in what is known as Conca Barese. This is a territory where olive trees have been the absolute protagonists of the landscape for centuries.

There is a high dose of tradition in the process that leads to the birth of De Carlo's extra virgin olive oil: ripe olives are harvested by hand, taken to the mill within 12 hours and pressed with historical granite millstones. The oil is extracted from the olive paste thus obtained, using a mixed continuous cycle plant. This is how traditional and organic extra virgin olive oils, flavored oils and oil used in the production of creams, sauces and products in oil are made.