The first thing you learn as an olive oil judge is to stop swirling like a wine drinker and start slurping like a toddler. You cup the little blue-tasting glass in your palm to warm it, inhale hard, then strip the oil across your tongue with a sharp intake of breath — a technique called strippaggio that sounds far more elegant in Italian than it does in a room full of judges doing it simultaneously.
After a decade of diving deep into the sensory realm of olives, there’s one thing I know for sure: California is no longer chasing the Mediterranean. It has no doubt caught up — and, in the best bottles, pulled ahead.
RELATED: National Extra Virgin Olive Oil Day proves this kitchen staple can do more than you think
That’s a bold claim for a state that still supplies only a sliver of what Americans pour. California produces somewhere between 2 million and 4 million gallons of olive oil each year (depending on growing conditions) — only 5 to 8 percent of domestic consumption — from about 400 producers farming around 37,000 acres. The rest arrives by ship, mostly from Spain, Italy and Greece, often many months past its prime.
But volume was never California’s argument; the Golden State’s thesis is quality. At the 2025 New York International Olive Oil Competition, the industry’s most-watched contest, American producers, overwhelmingly Californian, took home 92 awards, competing head-to-head with estates that have been pressing olives since the Renaissance.
The trajectory of California olive oil parallels that of its wine. Fifty years ago, California wine was a punchline until the Judgment of Paris made it a headline. California olive oil is having its own slow-motion Paris moment, for some of the same reasons: legit Mediterranean micro-climates, UC Davis research muscle (the university’s Olive Center is the industry’s brain trust), and a generation of producers who treat olives the way Napa treats Cabernet — as an expression of place, picked at the perfect moment and milled within hours.
The Blue Hills
Nowhere is that philosophy more moving than in the Capay Valley, a ribbon of farmland tucked between the Sacramento Valley and the ridgeline that separates it from Napa. This is the ancestral homeland of the Yocha Dehe Wintun Nation, whose people lived here for thousands of years before being forced off their land — first by Spanish missions, later by the U.S. government, which relocated them to barren ground where farming was impossible. It took decades of struggle before the tribe returned to arable land in the valley, and portions of their ancestral territory were finally restored in the 1980s.
What they built on it is Séka Hills — séka means “blue” in the tribe’s Patwin language, for the blue hills that frame the valley — and it is, to my knowledge, the only Native American tribe growing, milling and bottling its own extra-virgin olive oil commercially.
The tribe planted its first high-density olive orchard in 2008, guided by a saying that predates every olive tree in California: If you take care of the land, it will take care of you. By 2012, the tribe had a state-of-the-art mill, allowing the olives to travel from tree to crusher in minutes. Today, the operation spans more than 500 acres of olives — Arbequina, Picual, Frantoio, Coratina, Taggiasca — within a sustainably managed portfolio of more than 25,000 acres of tribal farm and ranchland.
Arbequina is the flagship bottle you’ll find at specialty grocers: buttery and fruit-forward with a clean peppery finish. But in the IYKYK department, olio nuovo is the crown jewel. Unfiltered, electric green, and bottled immediately after harvest each fall, its grassy bite evolves in the bottle. For the best chance of scoring your own stash of this limited production, go to the source.
The Séka Hills Olive Mill & Tasting Room in Brooks, California, about an hour from Sacramento, is a 14,000-square-foot showcase of reclaimed wood and valley views, where you can watch the fall crush in action, taste through the varietals alongside the tribe’s wines and wildflower honey, and a charcuterie platter with local meats and cheeses. (In 2024, a second tasting room opened in Midtown Sacramento for those who can’t make the drive to the mill.)
Where California wine country learned to crush olives
The other root of California’s olive oil renaissance runs deep through wine country. In Petaluma, McEvoy Ranch has been the gold standard since 1990, when Nan McEvoy planted Tuscan varieties on a former dairy ranch; three generations later, the estate took Best of Show at the 2026 California State Fair with an audacious oil co-milled with fresh ginger and turmeric. It’s a combo so very California that it should come with yoga pants.
In Sonoma’s Alexander Valley, Jordan Vineyard & Winery blends its estate oils with the same philosophy as its wines — vibrant, elegant, smooth, each variety harvested and milled separately, then married before bottling into something round and harmonious.
And in San Martin, south of San Jose, sixth-generation farmer Patrick Martin’s Frantoio Grove mills estate Frantoio olives within 90 minutes of picking from a Regenerative Organic Certified orchard, capturing the varietal at its most vivid: the artichokey bitterness and chile-like heat at the back of the throat that deliver your daily dose of cholesterol-friendly polyphenols.
Even the big players are consolidating around California’s promise: In late 2025, Australia’s Cobram Estate announced a $173.5 million deal to acquire California Olive Ranch, the state’s largest producer, more than doubling its California groves.
The insider’s bottle, though, hides in Rutherford: Bella Oaks, the storied vineyard behind some of Napa’s earliest single-vineyard Cabernets, presses a certified-organic oil from just 200 estate trees — a five-variety blend of Frantoio, Leccino, Ascolano, Pendolino and old Mission — released once a year to its mailing list. It might be the hardest olive oil in the valley to get your hands on. Make an appointment to see the art collection (including a Yayoi Kusama installation) for your best shot at the oil.
Freshness is the terroir
Here is the open secret that makes California olive oil worth its premium: Olive oil is not wine. It does not improve with age. It is a fresh fruit juice that should be consumed as soon as possible after bottling. An imported oil that spent 18 months in transit and on shelves, no matter its pedigree, cannot compete with a California oil milled last November.
When you taste a fresh, well-made extra-virgin — the perfume of just-mown grass, a green-almond sweetness, a slow-building warmth that proves the oil is truly alive — you understand why folks get evangelical.
So, make the pilgrimage. Time a fall visit to the Capay Valley for the crush at Séka Hills. Make an appointment at Bella Oaks. Detour to a tasting room the next time you’re in range of Healdsburg or Petaluma. Look for the California Olive Oil Council’s certification seal and a harvest date on the label — not a vague “best by” — and buy the newest oil you can find. Then use it lavishly, not preciously. The best olive oil is meant to be poured, not enshrined.
Dining and Cooking