We make very few bottles aiming for high quality. La Collina Blu is made with the typical Tuscan olive varieties: leccino, frantoio and moraiolo. We press our olives within a couple of hours after picking to keep important antioxidants and vitamins. A high-quality Extra Virgin Olive Oil is not only excellent in flavor - but it is also healthy. La Collina Blu is a project that I and my husband, who builds olive oil presses, have been working on for a long time amidst kids and work and daily life. The name La Collina Blu is a tribute to the beautiful blue light that surrounds our Tuscan hill just before sunset. But it is also a tribute to Blue Hill, the complicated suburb north of Stockholm where I grew up. Here, kids start out with very little, but with a little love and trust, they are capable of giving back much more than you could ever imagine. Just like olive trees. To me, olive oil is something that unites my two worlds. In Blue Hill my mom bought the first olive oil I ever tasted from a little Greek supermarket. For a Swedish family it was exotic and a new discovery in the 1980s. My husband Stefano builds olive oil presses (and is the real olive oil nerd in the family), and when I go back to Sweden, my boys and I always bring back a shoot from the olive tree in our garden to put on my father’s grave. Maybe one day all of the shoots that we’ve put there for the last twenty years will turn into an olive tree. The label is made by Francesco Giani, an artist, and friend, and recalls the thirteen-floor tall houses and their thousands of windows, in Blue Hill. Houses that were built in the ’60s to host the first immigrants arriving in Sweden.
