La Collina Blu is a project that myself 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. Who knows?
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.
La Collina Blu is an artisanal extra virgin olive oil, hand-picked, hand bottled and labelled by hand. La Collina Blu is cold pressed within a couple of hours after harvest to keep vitamins and antioxidants. The varieties are the traditional Tuscan cultivars; leccino, frantoio and moraiolo, that gives a typical Tuscan flavour of fresh-cut grass, artichoke, almond and with a balanced peppery finish. It is an elegant extra virgin olive oil adding flavour but without covering the character of the food that you are using it with.
La Collina Blu is organically produced without any kind of additives.
