I tried a bottle of Aeons olive oil for a month. My honest review

This one arrived in our house by way of my mother, who read about it in a newspaper and was taken with the story. Olives from volcanic soil in Tuscany. A small family farm. Hand harvesting, pressing within twenty four hours, methods handed down rather than modernised. The Italian angle did the rest. By the time she mentioned it to me she had already ordered.

So I tried it properly. Not drizzled over a salad where it disappears, but neat, a small shot of it every morning for a month.

The taste

Very good. That is the honest headline and it deserves to come first.

It has the peppery catch at the back of the throat that you get in a fresh oil and do not get in the plastic bottle stuff from the supermarket. Grassy, slightly bitter, with a proper finish. Taken on its own it is not remotely unpleasant, which is more than can be said for a lot of things people take by the spoon.

If you spent £50 on a bottle of wine you would want it to taste like something. This does.

The bottle

Small. Smaller than the price prepares you for.

250ml at £49.95 works out at just under £20 per 100ml. At one tablespoon a day a bottle lasts roughly a fortnight. Do that maths across a year and you are looking at a standing order in the region of £1,200 for a single item in the kitchen cupboard.

Bundles knock the unit price down. They also mean handing over a lot more money at once.

What we could not check

Ancient Roots sells itself on polyphenols. Polyphenols are measurable. Anyone can send an oil to a laboratory and publish the number in milligrams per kilogram, and plenty of brands in this corner of the market do exactly that, alongside a harvest date so you know how fresh you are getting.

Aeons does not publish either. No lab certificate, no harvest date, and the oil is not certified organic. The label tells you the soil is volcanic and the flavour is peppery, both of which we can confirm, and stops there.

That is the part that grated. Rival oils in the same bracket publish their figures and sell 500ml, twice the volume, for somewhere between £22 and £25. You are being asked to pay four times the price for a number nobody will show you.

After a month

Nothing to report. No difference I could point at and attribute to the oil rather than to the weather, sleep, or the general noise of a month passing. Possibly a month is not long enough. Possibly a month at £100 is as long as most people are willing to test it for.

Verdict

Three stars out of five. A genuinely delicious oil sold at a price its own paperwork does not support.

I would happily keep it in the house at half the price, and I would keep it at this price if the brand published what is actually in the bottle. As things stand, it is a lovely bottle of olive oil wrapped in a very expensive story.

If you want the taste, buy a fresh single origin oil with a harvest date on the label and spend the difference on something else. If you want it because your mother read about it in the paper, at least buy the bundle.

Purchased at full price. Prices correct as of publication.