Talk to enough olive oil producers and you notice a pattern: almost none of them set out to end up here. They arrive by a longer, stranger road.
Attimo is one of those stories.
When I first spoke with founder Gilles, I expected our conversation to revolve around harvests and the inevitable discussion of polyphenols that seems to find its way into almost every conversation I have these days. Instead, we spent much of our time talking about childhood, technology, slowing down, and a feeling so many people seem to be carrying: that despite all the convenience modern life has given us, something meaningful has slipped away, and that’s exactly what Gilles is bringing to the table.
Naturally, I wanted to know where it all began.
“I think it’s best told as my life story, folded into a bottle,” he told me when I asked where Attimo really began.
His earliest memories are of Italy rather than Belgium, where he grew up. Every summer his family drove South to agriturismi tucked into the Tuscan hills, the kind of places where breakfast bled into lunch and nobody seemed particularly interested in rushing anywhere. “The owner knows the farmer who made the cheese,” he said. “An afternoon can pass without anything happening, and somehow be full.” He had a name for it: Vita Lenta. The slow life. He was a child, so he had no way of knowing it was something you could lose.
Losing it happened when he was about fifteen years old. He got a computer and started building websites, first for fun, then for money, then for a career, right as the tech industry began its long climb. He moved to the city at eighteen and started thinking of himself as a city person, someone who was, as he put it, “good at fast.” He adopted new technology before his friends had heard of it. The faster the world moved, the more at home he felt in it.
What touched me most was that there was no dramatic turning point. Somewhere in his early thirties, something started reversing. “Not a burnout, not a crisis,” he said. “More a quiet recalibration.” The pace that used to energise him began to exhaust him instead. He found himself craving the timeless over the new, and he doesn’t think it’s only him. “I developed in lockstep with the world on the way up, and I think I’m doing it again on the way back,” he told me. “Everywhere I look, people are exhausted by how virtual life has become, and with AI, more so by the day. There’s a deep cultural yearning underneath it all to pull back to things we can hold in our hands, taste, smell, feel.”
The question that reframed everything for him was simple: how do you want to grow old? When he pictured retirement, the image that came to him, unbidden, was hills in Umbria, an olive grove, morning light on silver green leaves. It took him a while to notice that the image wasn’t a fantasy at all. It was his childhood summers, returning as a destination.
Olive oil, as it turned out, was the perfect canvas for that realisation. Gilles has spent years obsessed with health and longevity. He tracks it, reads about it, optimises for it, and the deeper he went, the more he kept arriving at the same place: that few foods are as thoroughly studied, or as powerful, as this one. “It’s ancient and cutting edge at once,” he said. Three thousand years of Mediterranean instinct, confirmed polyphenol by polyphenol in modern labs. A fruit, pressed, nothing added, and somehow one of the most sophisticated health products imaginable.
But for all the talk of chemistry, what stayed with me was his admiration for the people producing it. “Every producer I’ve met is grounded, generous, completely unhurried,” he said. “They work with the rhythm of seasons, not sprints. These are the people I want to grow old around.”
The original plan, he admits, was to wait and buy the house, plant the grove, and retire into the dream at sixty something. Then he realised the dream didn’t have to wait for him. Over the past two harvests, he has travelled through Spain, Portugal, and Italy, some of it familiar ground seen with new eyes, walking through groves, tasting oils, building relationships with producers, and selecting only early harvest, single variety Extra Virgin Olive Oils he genuinely believes in. Greece is next.
The oils themselves mirror that philosophy. Rather than chasing a single house style, Attimo embraces the individuality of place through three very different cultivars. There is the bold, intensely green Picual from the rolling groves of Jaén in Andalucía, the beautifully structured Coratina from Puglia with its unmistakable bitterness and peppery finish, and the generous, fruit forward Nocellara from Sicily, whose softer elegance offers an entirely different expression of the Mediterranean. Together they serve as a reminder that olive oil, much like wine, speaks fluently of where it comes from and of the people who have devoted themselves to producing it.
There’s a family precedent for all of this, and it’s the part I most appreciate. Gilles’s father is a banker who has spent nearly two decades of holidays driving through Italy, visiting winemakers, having dinner with them, and bringing home only the bottles he believes in. “I watched that my whole life,” Gilles said. “Selection as a form of friendship. I’m the next generation of it, same instinct, different product, and a considerably bigger obsession with polyphenols.” It was never really a story about wine. It was about letting trust become a form of curation, and recognising that the character of a bottle can never be separated from the character of the people behind it. Attimo, he told me, is where all of it finally converges. “Fifteen years in tech taught me to build websites, brands, and systems. Along the way I developed a taste for visuals, for words, and for products. This is the first project where everything I love and everything I’m good at point the same way: something built slowly, with people I love, on my own terms.”
Authenticity gets thrown around so much in this industry it’s practically lost its meaning, but stories like this still land as genuine, and truly authentic.
I feel that is ultimately what Attimo offers: not just a well made Extra Virgin Olive Oil, but an invitation to a slower rhythm and to living a more intentional life, on your own terms.
