03 — Process
Everything below happens between 04:20 and 11:00 on the same morning, on one floor in Tortona, with a window onto the street so you can watch it if you are up early enough.
The four numbers that decide everything else
Produce is cut, lifted or picked the same morning it is pressed. Nothing sits in a cold room for a week waiting for a production slot. Two growers, both inside a ninety-minute drive, both on standing weekly volumes so nothing is over-ordered and composted.
Everything is graded by hand. Bruised, split or under-ripe stock is pulled and goes to the kitchen next door rather than into a bottle. Roughly one crate in nine never makes it to the mill — a number we would rather publish than hide.
A slow-turning grinder ruptures the cell walls without generating friction heat. Speed is the enemy here: fast blades aerate the mash, and aerated mash oxidises before it ever reaches the press.
The mash is wrapped in cloth and stacked into a hydraulic press that closes over eighteen minutes. Six tonnes of static force, no heat, no centrifuge, no enzymes to cheat the yield. What comes out is what was in the fruit.
Sealed bottles go into a cold water chamber and are taken to six thousand bar — twice the pressure at the bottom of the Mariana Trench. It inactivates spoilage organisms without a single degree of heat, so nothing in the flavour is cooked away.
Out of the chamber, into two degrees, and onto a van before noon. The chain never breaks between our floor and the shelf you take it from — which is the only honest way to sell something with a forty-five day life and no preservatives.
What it costs us
We cannot warehouse stock, so we produce against real orders and accept the volatility that comes with it.
Two degrees from our floor to the shelf. It rules out most distributors and every stockist without proper refrigeration.
No enzymes, no water, no press-aid. What the fruit gives is what we sell, and in a dry season that is less.