The mill that grinds at dawn

At five thirty in the morning, the Cazorla sierra is still dark. Inés Castillo, sixth generation of the family mill, walks down to the yard with a flask of coffee and opens the press house. The first olives arrive twenty minutes later, still cold from the grove.

«Fruit temperature changes the oil», she says as she places a crate on the conveyor. «If the olive comes in warm, the press cooks it from the inside. Here we try to be earlier than the sun.»

The mill grinds early-harvest picual, picked in the second week of October, when the fruit still holds a high water proportion and polyphenols are at their peak. The oil that comes out is green, intense, peppery. Not for every palate. Nor does it try to be.

Each year the family bottles fewer than sixty thousand bottles. Each one numbered, each lot traced back to the terrace it came from. «We do not want to be bigger», says Inés. «We want to be exact.» In the back room, a chalkboard tracks this year’s lots: two hundred and forty-two, forty-three, forty-four.

Before we leave, Inés hands us a spoonful of freshly pressed oil. It bites. It burns for a second in the throat. It is that burn («la picada», they call it here) that separates the green young oils from the soft ones. Inés smiles and walks back to the press. Half an hour to go before sunrise.