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THE WORKSHOP FILES

The Factories Stopped Making Boards From Solid Wood. Giuseppe Bertolino Never Did.

For decades, factories swapped century-old olive wood for fast-grown filler and glue. One workshop in Piedmont still cuts boards the slow way.

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By Daniel Hoffman · May 28, 2026

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Giuseppe Bertolino with a finished olive wood board in his Piedmont workshop

There was a time when a serving board was meant to outlive the man who bought it. It came from a single slab of hardwood, shaped by hand, and it carried the marks of every dinner it ever hosted. A good one was passed down, not thrown out.

Somewhere in the last 40 years, that idea quietly died. The boards in most British kitchens today are pressed, glued, and coated to look like wood while being mostly anything but. Giuseppe Bertolino is one of the few men left who refused to follow.

The Year The Factories Killed The Board

In the mid-1980s, the big housewares brands found a cheaper way. Instead of cutting a board from one solid piece of slow-grown wood, they began gluing thin strips of fast-grown rubberwood and bamboo into blocks, then sealing them under a film of mineral oil and lacquer.

It looked the same on a store shelf. It cost a fraction to make. And it let a factory in another hemisphere ship 1,000 identical boards a day.

What disappeared was the wood itself. The dense, wild, slow-grown grain that took a tree a century to build. You cannot mass-produce a hundred-year-old olive tree, so the industry simply stopped trying.

The Man Who Refused To Switch

Giuseppe Bertolino learned the trade in his father's olive grove in Apulia, where the family had pulled dead olive trees from the red southern soil since 1965. When a tree stops bearing fruit after a century, most farmers burn it. The Bertolinos saw something else in that wood.

By the time the factories went fully automated, the Bertolinos had a workshop of their own in Alba, in Piedmont's north. Buyers told Giuseppe to switch to glued blanks and triple his output. He said no. Today, at 61, he still works the same way his father taught him.

Every Alba board still begins as one solid piece of reclaimed olive, cut from a tree that gave fruit for generations before it gave a table.

Own One Made The Old Way

How The Old Way Beats The Shortcut

A glued board is built for the factory, not the kitchen. Strips of soft, fast-grown wood are pressed together with adhesive, then hidden under lacquer. The first deep knife cut breaks that seal. Water creeps into the seams, the glue lets go, and the board warps or splits within a few seasons.

A solid olive board has no seams to fail. Giuseppe cuts each one along the tree's natural growth, sands it through 7 grits by hand, and finishes it with nothing but food-safe oil rubbed into the grain.

The olive does the rest. Its grain is so dense and swirled that a knife glides across it instead of scarring it, and the wood quietly closes over the marks it does take.

My father had a wooden board he used every Sunday for 30 years. I thought that kind of thing was gone. The day this arrived I understood the difference. It has a weight and a grain that the store-bought ones simply never had.

— Gary M., 58

What The Cheap Board Quietly Costs You

The mass-produced board fails you slowly, so you rarely blame it. The surface dulls. A faint smell of old oil and trapped moisture sets in. Within a year or two it looks tired, and you replace it without a second thought, because it was never meant to last.

You also lose the thing a real board is supposed to give a host. The weight of it in your hands. The quiet authority of setting down one solid slab of wood when friends come over, instead of a glued rectangle that could have come from anywhere.

A dad who takes pride in his table notices that difference. So do the people at it.

These Boards Outlive The Men Who Buy Them

In the villages around Alba, olive wood boards are not bought so much as inherited. Giuseppe still repairs pieces his father made in the 1970s, brought back by the grandchildren of the families who first owned them. A light sanding and fresh oil, and they are good for another generation.

That is the real test of a serving board, and it is one no glued, coated, factory blank can pass. You will never hand down something you bought to be disposable.

An Alba board, by contrast, gets better with every year and every meal. The oil from the food, the warmth of being handled, the small marks of real use all deepen the grain instead of ruining it.

I have restored furniture for over 40 years, and solid olive is one of the hardest, most beautiful woods you can put on a table. A single-piece board like this will outlast every glued board in the store, easily by decades.

— Thomas R., furniture restorer

One Of The Last Workshops Still Selling Direct

Giuseppe is one of the last makers in Piedmont still cutting boards from single pieces of reclaimed olive. Because the supply of century-old trees that have stopped bearing fruit is finite, only a small number of boards leave the workshop each month, and no two are alike.

To keep the craft alive, the workshop now sells straight to British homes instead of through the import chain that killed the trade. With no middlemen and no department-store markup, that brings an Alba board to 70% OFF the price those same stores once charged.

It is offered as a one-time, direct-from-the-bench price, for as long as the reclaimed olive lasts. When a board is gone, it is gone for good.

See The Last Of Them

Own A Piece Made Before The Craft Vanishes

Somewhere along the way, we decided that the things in our kitchens were meant to be replaced, not kept. Giuseppe Bertolino spent his life proving the opposite. Every board he sends out carries a hundred years of Mediterranean sun in its grain and the hands of a man who refused to let the old way die.

For a father who hosts, who pours the wine and carves at the head of the table, it is not really a gift. It is an heirloom handed over a little early. The reclaimed olive is limited, so the moment to claim one is now.

Check Availability At The Workshop

Giuseppe, master woodworker, the Alba workshop, Piedmont

Alba Olive Wood Board

One solid piece of century-old reclaimed olive, cut by hand to outlive everything else in your kitchen.

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What Buyers Are Saying

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David L.

Bought this for my dad and he actually teared up. The grain is unreal, every swirl is different. He uses it every weekend now.

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Susan K.

I have had cheap boards crack and warp within a year. This one is solid as a rock, no seams to fail. You can feel the difference the moment you lift it.

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Robert P.

AAs someone who hosts a lot, this has become the centrepiece of every gathering. Guests always ask about it. It only looks better the more we use it.

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Linda M.

My husband was always scared to scratch our old expensive board. This olive one just shrugs off knife marks. He finally relaxes and actually uses it.

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Michael T.

You can tell this came from one real tree, not glued strips. The weight, the smell of the wood, the wild grain. Nothing from a big store compares.

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Janet R.

This is the kind of thing you hand down. I already told my son it is his one day. They genuinely do not make them like this anymore.

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ADVERTISING DISCLOSURE: This website and the products & services referred to on the site are advertising marketplaces. This website is an advertisement and not a news publication. Any photographs of persons used on this site are models. The owner of this site and of the products and services referred to on this site only provides a service where consumers can obtain and compare

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