Cortijo De Suerte Alta S.L.

In 1986 I took charge of our family estate, Cortijo de Suerte Alta. For the last twenty years we have planted more trees, we started in 1996 with Organic Farming, we equipped the farm with a drip-fed irrigation system and, finally in 2006, we built a modern mill of our own, designed as an environmental building and set close to the family house, in the heart of the estate. The oil produced and bottled in Suerte Alta is Extra Virgin Olive Oil. Its unique and special character is due to three conditions: it is ESTATE PRODUCED and BOTTLED, ORGANIC, and D. O. BAENA.. As we produce and bottle our oil in Suerte Alta, we can control that all of it comes from olives of the family estate. All the farm work and care, from the tree up to the bottle is carried on by a work team formed in the estate along these twenty years. The harvest begins early, on the first week of November, when olives reach their optimum ripeness. Olives are only picked from the trees, crushed at room temperature (en frío) by mechanical means and go on to the decanters. The oil we produce goes then through a strict analytic control carried on by the official laboratories we have always worked with. ORGANIC FARMING, with the C.A.A.E. official Certificate, guarantees that the oil is free from residues of weed-killers, pesticides or chemical fertilizers, that farm work is set on supporting the soil and local vegetation of the estate increasing organic matter and biodiversity. We are specially proud of having achieved energetic balance between power consumption and generation, through the environmental design of the mill and its thermic system based on air barriers, vegetation screens and photovoltaic modules, and by recovering and using the olive´s pit as bio-fuel. The CONTROL COUNCIL from the D. O. Baena certifies that the oil bottled with its stamp comes from and has been produced in Suerte Alta´s mill, that it comes from tanks sealed and controlled by their staff “in situ”, and that it has been qualified as Extra Virgin Olive Oil by the Official Tasters Panel of the D. O. Baena and following the analytic controls of their official laboratory. In our first milling season, 2006-2007, we have won with Suerte Alta the Gold Medal for Quality in the annual awards given by the D. O. Baena.