Blending sounds harmless — even artful, like a winemaker balancing a cuvée. But industrial olive oil blending serves a different master. Its purpose is not beauty; it is uniformity and cost. Oils from different countries, different harvests, and different ages are combined until the result tastes the same in March as it did in October, year after year, at a price the buyer likes.
The problem is what blending erases and what it hides. It erases character: the peppery kick of a fresh harvest, the fingerprint of a particular grove and season, flattened into something inoffensive. And it hides fatigue: older, duller oil folded into fresher stock until no single component can be blamed. When no one grew the oil, no one answers for it.
A single-estate oil cannot hide anywhere. It is one harvest, one press, one place — its flaws would be plainly visible, so the only option is to have none. That is the discipline Posterino has kept in San Procopio for six generations.
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