DAYTON, Ore. — In 2005, winemaker Paul Durant planted 2,000 olive trees in Oregon.
The Durant family has grown wine grapes in the Willamette Valley for more than 50 years; the goal two decades ago was to diversify their product line. The family was among the first to plant grape vines in the area in 1973 — and Paul Durant is now leading a boutique olive oil boom in the Northwest.
Durant produced and sold his first olive oil bottles in 2008. It has become a new product line: The brand now primarily produces single-cultivar bottles of oil from California-grown olives as well as a local, estate-grown oil. (Of the 280 tons of olive oil that Durant Olive Mill produced in 2024, 10 were from Oregon-grown olives.)
Their blend of four kinds of Oregon-grown and -milled olives sells in 375 milliliter bottles for $45 each. This year, the Estate Blend won a silver medal at an international olive oil competition in New York City, and the company is ranked ninth in the world by the Olive Oil Times (yes, it’s a real thing). California Olive Ranch is the only other top 10 olive oil in the United States.
Durant was ahead of his time. The Oregon olive oil industry is a slow burn — less a powder keg than a dynamite stick, with a fuse that’s been burning for years — and while the interest in growing olives for oil has crept through the valley much like espaliered pinot noir vines, not everybody is making a profit just yet. But excitement for the product, grown farther north than most of the world’s other olive oil producers, has firmly taken root.
For Durant, the olive mill is projected to outpace the vineyard in sales next year. Beyond the business side, the company’s founder said education and community are among his main goals. He’s hoping everybody gets in on the olive rush.
“Our role is also to be mentors for others looking to get into the industry,” Durant said. “I have always said we are an open book for people, and we readily share our experiences to help foster the industry.”
As Durant and his crew look forward to their 16th annual Olio Nuovo Festival next month — a monthlong event spread across every weekend in November celebrating newly milled olive oil — fall is a perfect time to see what’s cooking in the world of Oregon olive oil.
Olive oil outlier
Picture an olive grove, with rows of gnarled, ancient trees from Italy, Greece or Spain. Maybe a slice of glittering sea sprawls behind the grove.
It’s not the Mediterranean, but there’s a certain timeless beauty in the olive trees of Oregon, too.
The lush Willamette Valley stretches roughly 150 miles from Portland to just beyond Eugene. It’s one of the northernmost olive-oil-producing regions in the world.
How these Oregon towns became a hub for olive oil
In the lush Willamette Valley, known more for wine than olive oil, several vineyards have diversified their portfolios in recent years by focusing on producing olive oil.
Durant and his peers are geographical outliers, with far more famous olive oil hubs in warmer climes around the Mediterranean, as well as lesser-known ones in Germany, Croatia and Slovenia. There is one olive mill farther north than the Willamette: The Olive Farm on Salt Spring Island, B.C., which hasn’t produced a commercial harvest since 2023 and is currently for sale for $9.6 million.
Dayton sits among a constellation of small, agriculturally rich towns just outside McMinnville: Dundee, Carlton, Amity, Lafayette and Sherwood, to name a few. The valley contains some of the most fertile, friendly soil in the world, famous worldwide for growing grapes, hazelnuts, grass seed, Christmas trees and, maybe someday, olives.
“We are farming on the edge,” said Beth Wendland, owner of tree nursery and olive mill Coyote Hill. “We’re going to be innovators or we’re going to be a cautionary tale, and we don’t know which. We’re one really bad winter away from things being gone.”
On her farm in Sherwood, Wendland owns and operates a nursery in addition to growing and milling olive oil. Her trees, a mixture of cultivars from Spain, France, Italy, Greece, Egypt and the U.S., were planted beginning in 2017. A small producer, she made 70 bottles of olive oil last year (available for sale at coyote-hill.com).
She opens the mill up for an annual community milling event where growers of all sizes with olives can mill them for $2 a pound. (This year it’s scheduled for Nov. 8; with its commercial olive oil press, Durant hosts a similar community milling event during the Olio Nuovo Festival.)
And she’s on the cutting edge: Wendland is working with Neil Bell and Heather Stoven of Oregon State University, who are overseeing and studying 116 types of olive trees at the North Willamette Research and Extension Center in Aurora.
After receiving questions from multiple growers about the cold-hardiness of olive trees, Bell and Stoven received a grant in 2017 for the research project. They planted 412 trees in 2021 and, for the first time, they’ll have enough olives to press into oil this year.
“If nothing,” Bell joked, “this project has turned us into olive oil snobs.”
After collecting four years of data, Bell says things are just “beginning to get really interesting.”
The goal is to figure out which among those 116 types are the best suited for Oregon’s climate. There’s frost to worry about — one dip below freezing and the oil will be affected — and a search for the perfect, well-draining soil. The positives for producers: Irrigation is not burdensome, and there’s low pest pressure (though Stoven said the emerald ash borer beetle could turn its gaze to olive trees after it eats up every ash tree in Oregon).
“It’s a boutique product,” Bell said. It’s “high-value and based on unique cultivars, and if we could keep it organic, it would be a specialty crop” for Oregon.
What else is standing in the way of Northwest olive growers? Wendland said it’s a matter of sorting the olives after they’ve been grown. Finding a market — without overextending resources.
“Are you going to do olives for oil? Are you going to do table olives? How are you going to farm it? There is no labor here. No one is trained to prune an olive tree. No one is trained to harvest,” Wendland said. “Get the labor thing figured out. Don’t plant more trees than you personally can take care of. Start small so you can lose small.”
Entrepreneurs, vineyards opt for olives (EVOO)
Peter Vetter and Doug Root started small in 2008 with their olive grove in Carlton.
The couple first planted the trees with the intention of brining the olives and selling them at farmers markets. After Oregon began requiring a permit to brine table olives, they pivoted. They sold their olives to Durant for a few years before connecting with nearby Soter Vineyards about three years ago, shaking on a deal to provide olives to be made into oil for their culinary program.
“It really turned out to be a perfect match,” said Vetter, looking across his property and a few fields beyond, over to Mineral Springs Ranch, where the Soter tasting room is.
Tony Soter, winemaker and founder of Soter Vineyards, has been so pleased with the Spanish varietal olive oil made from Vetter and Root’s trees that he’s planting three-quarters of an acre of olive trees.
“It’s encouraging enough, and we love the result, so I might just wing it and follow their lead,” Soter said. “I don’t know if there’s any other way to get going than to just do it.”
Some Oregon farmers didn’t have a choice but to wing it. They inherited trees.
Nathan Wood is a farmer and the vineyard manager and property manager at Johan Vineyards in Rickreall, another longtime vineyard that added olives to the mix. In 2019, Wood helped his dad plant an acre of olive trees a couple of hours south in Elkton. And when he started at Johan in 2022, he inherited 18 mixed olive trees that were planted in 2008.
“The difference between my dad’s oil and Johan’s is very noticeable,” Wood said. Oil from the Willamette is “the brightest green, grassiest, aromatic thing.” It is ”hitting another level of what we can do in Oregon for olive oil.”
Olio Nuovo Festival
Weekends in November at Durant Olive Mill at Red Ridge Farms, 5510 N.E. Breyman Orchards Road, Dayton, Ore.; various times and events, as well as visiting hours for the public at the mill; durantoregon.com/olio-nuovo-2025
Highlights include Feast Olio, a seven-course Italian luncheon featuring fresh olive oil and wine from Durant (reservations required; starting at $180 per ticket); Oeno and Olio, a tasting featuring wine, fresh olive oil and bruschetta (reservations required; starting at $63 per ticket); tours of the mill; a hands-on community milling day on Nov. 16; and a grand finale party and fundraiser on Nov. 29 and 30.
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Wood says olives tend to have larger harvests every other year. Some years, he can make oil solely from the trees at Johan, but other years he has to combine crops with friends who grow nearby.
Down in Elkton, the harvest of 2024 was the largest they’ve seen since planting the trees six years ago. They produced 20-odd gallons of oil. Wood’s dad isn’t making money hand over fist; he’s giving it to friends and having “a lot of fun with it.”
Once his dad’s trees mature, Wood hopes to sell the oil, with a target of 400 to 500 bottles per year. Johan’s olive oil is occasionally for sale in the tasting room, depending on the year and the yield.
Even two decades in, business isn’t quite booming in Oregon’s olive oil scene. But patience will pay off. Wood has seen enough in the last half-dozen years to feel optimistic about the future of the industry.
“I think it’s just around the corner,” he said. “It’s there. There’s a market, it’s just about finding those perfect spots.”
Jackie Varriano: Jackie Varriano is a food writer at The Seattle Times who covers neighborhood restaurants around Western Washington, reporting on the ways food and communities intersect.
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