Most premium olive oil bottles are competing with each other on who can look the most refined or have the best squeeze bottle, but D’Arbequina, designed by SMLXL, for the Els Batallosos farm in Catalonia is doing something completely its own, wrapping each of its 280 limited edition bottles in a raw black and white motion-sensor camera photograph of the fallow deer that actually live and roam among the olive trees on the property.
The images have a quality that no styled food photography could ever replicate, slightly grainy, caught in the ambient light of a trail camera at whatever hour the deer decided to appear, giving each label an intimacy that feels closer to wildlife documentary than luxury product. Every single one of the 280 bottles has a different photograph; the entire edition functions like a limited art series, making each bottle a completely singular object that happens to contain exceptional olive oil. The decision to let the land and its inhabitants be the entire design, removing human intervention from the label in exactly the same way the farm removes it from the harvest.
