The 2025 vintage marks the debut release from Beyond Olives — the first oil pressed by Daniel Zumofen, a neurosurgeon whose devotion to the land is a form of prayer. This is not mass production. This is not even production in the conventional sense. It is stewardship made liquid — every olive gathered by hands that give back what the earth has given.
From 44 organically tended trees, we pressed 76 liters of oil in autumn 2024. Boutique by scale. Family by conviction. Every bottle carries the signature of a single season, a single place, and the quiet discipline of a man who refuses to cut corners — in any part of his life.
Il Chirurgo e L'Olio · The Surgeon and the Oil
On a conventional farm, 44 trees would be too few to justify harvesting, pressing, bottling at all. Here they are the whole point — quality chosen over quantity, meaning over margin.
Seventy-six litres is 152 quarter-litre bottles, or 76 half-litres. Oil for a deliberate meal rather than a routine one.
When this vintage is gone, it will be gone. The 2026 harvest will be different—perhaps smaller, perhaps different in flavor. The terroir changes. The season changes. The oil that emerges will be a different record.
When roots run deep, time becomes flavor
These 44 trees are not young; many are rooted deeper than 500 years. They grow in the limestone of the Valle d'Itria, where water is scarce and a tree must reach for what it needs. Scarcity is what concentrates them.
Adriatic wind, summer heat, winter cold — each season leaves its mark in the oil. The pepper is early autumn, the grassiness is spring's growth, the gold is harvest.
This is terroir. The 2025 oil is not separate from the land; it is the land speaking.
La Degustazione · The Tasting
Deep gold-green — the colour of an early harvest, picked before full ripeness. The aroma is sharp and grassy; the peppery catch arrives at once, followed by the faint bitterness of polyphenols.
Tasting notes: Fresh grass. Artichoke. Green almond. A whisper of black pepper that lingers on the throat. Sweet undercut with herbaceous complexity. The finish is clean, with a brightness that speaks of fruit handled with care, pressed at the moment of peak freshness.
It will change. In six months the green notes soften; in a year new complexity appears; in three it still tastes of the 2024 season, understood more deeply.
Seventy-six bottles of 500ml — the format for daily cooking. One lasts several months in a well-used kitchen, long enough to live with the oil and watch your own palate change: over summer salads, finishing soups with its peppery warmth.
The bottle becomes a familiar object on the shelf, and over months you become part of the harvest's story rather than its endpoint.
A hundred and fifty-two bottles of 250ml — the tasting size, and the gift size. Enough to know the 2025 vintage without committing to it, small enough to travel easily to a friend's table.
To give one is to say: taste this, and know where it comes from. Colour, aroma, palate — the whole of it, shared rather than stockpiled.
A limited-edition tin carrying the Beyond Olives mark and the 2025 date. It keeps light off the oil, and stays on the shelf as an object long after the oil is gone.
Sealed against oxidation and light, it holds the oil fresher for longer — and afterwards it holds the memory of one particular year, and the hands that gathered and pressed it.
"The trees decide the quantity. I simply listen." — Daniel Zumofen, MD
Industrial agriculture maximises yield: push the trees, exhaust the soil, accelerate until something breaks. Daniel chose the opposite, as he chose medicine over business. He harvests what the trees give and offers what he can, knowing next year may be different.
The 2025 oil is available now, in two formats, in limited quantity. When it is gone there will be the 2026 harvest — abundant or spare, and certainly different.
To choose it is to choose constraint — and the belief that the best things cannot be mass-produced, only made carefully for those patient enough to look.
Home
The Farm
The Land
The Renovations
Overview
The Trees
The Olives
The Harvest
The Pressing
Bee Sanctuary
Biodiversity