The Santa Bianca method for distilling essential oils

Distilling essential oils is our work and our passion, in the last fifteen years we have defined our working method which we apply every day on our farm and which we enforce on those who supply us with those essential oils which for climatic reasons do not we can produce in Tuscany.
Find out with us what the Santa Bianca method is.

There are many steps to follow to obtain a special product, from the care of agriculture and raw materials to the method of extraction and refining of the final product.

Essential oils are obtained from very delicate extractions, it is necessary to follow a rigid working method to obtain a complete oil which can be summarized in three fundamental points.

1- Agriculture

it must necessarily be the least invasive possible, for this reason we do not give any medicine to plants, not even those allowed by the biological disciplinary (which we have).

The plants therefore come from semi-wild crops or from spontaneous harvesting, this in order to be able to develop all the properties to the maximum and consequently the aromatic complexity we aim for.
Like all living beings, even the plant world thinks economically, if a plant does not need a molecule because it is helped externally, it will not develop it exactly like, for example, our body does not develop specific antibodies until it is attacked by a certain microorganism, in the same way if a plant is given a medicine which no longer requires the production of a molecule, it will simply no longer be produced.
Furthermore, the plants are harvested and distilled only once a year in the "balsamic" period, i.e. in their best aromatic moment.
Obviously each plant needs special attention and the work in the fields (even more so since the plants are not chemically helped) is very demanding.

2-The distillation:

Essential oils are extracted with suitable tools and are distilled for as long as needed.

Our technique for obtaining essential oils is that of the tradition that dates back to ancient Egypt, the proportion between height and diameter of the stills is important, ours follow the rules of the golden section.
We distill a little at a time: a maximum of 150/200 kg of plant at a time to guarantee control over pressure and temperatures which are checked every half hour.
On average, plants give about 70% of the essential oil in the first hour of distillation, this is why industrial distillates last from 20 minutes to a maximum of an hour and a half; vice versa our distillates last on average 6-8 hours up to a maximum of three days in order to extract all the properties and obtain complete essential oils in all aspects according to the principles of Pharmacopoeia.

3- The lab:

Our essential oils are aged for a minimum of 6 months up to a maximum of two years in glass containers.

It is necessary to allow time for the perfume to stabilize definitively and to be as pleasant as possible, after which the oils are bottled pure at 100% exactly as they came out of the distiller, no subsequent intervention is made (no addition of synthesis molecules in the laboratory or dilutions in other oils such as GSE).
We rarely carry out a rectification with a spagyric redistillation column used only if we want to remove impurities.

Another aspect that we consider very important is sustainability, we are a company that does not chase unbridled development but, rather, aims for homeostasis, by cultivating the land we realize that there cannot be infinite growth in a finite environment.

We are the heirs of a millenary trade, and we owe our knowledge to those who, over the centuries, have conducted pioneering experiments and researches, we hope with our work to keep intact a tradition that could disappear in a world increasingly moving towards chemical and summary or voted solely for profit.