CdP
11 November 2008
On
Sunday I took our olives to the frantoio (press)
and had oil made. Of course, our six trees didn’t really
produce sufficient olives to justify a whole press-vat to
themselves… in fact they produced about half of the
absolute minimum (a quintale, ie 100kg). Instead
I dumped them in with our neighbour Jo’s, so what we
have in our bottles and tins, so beautifully adorned with
my Olio Galeotta label, is almost all his but just
a little bit ours. And naturally, the best bit must be ours.
After seven years of failing to pick our crop, it was a good feeling to get out there and do it. We have tried before. One year we had friends up here to help, and Lee and I spent much time arguing – as I remember – over the correct way to lay the nets out so that the olives, when knocked off the trees, didn’t just wonderwall over the top and lose themselves in the grass beyond. There was much tension in the air. In the end we picked hardly any, allowed what we had picked to rot in their red plastic baskets, then chucked them several days later. That wasn’t a good year.
Then last year (not a great year for olives) Vittorio picked the big tree in front of the kitchen, and kindly gave us a five-litre flagon of what was probably mostly his own oil.
But this year I was gripped with the desire not to let the fruit go to waste. It’s a good year. For months there hardly seemed to be an olive on the trees, then suddenly they exploded. The big tree in front of the kitchen was weighed down with them; the other trees much less so, poor old neglected things that they are, but still reasonably fruitful. The fly that crawls into olives almost every year and makes them small and shrivelled is totally absent. Everyone is picking early. The days – once the morning mist has lifted and the heavy dew dried off – are still warm and pleasant to be out in (unlike most years at olive-picking time when it tends to be bitter and grey). So with L inside working to finish an article or two, out I went, and started picking.
This time I could lay my nets as I wished: I had no one to argue net-engineering with. And of course I could get the fruit out of the trees as I wished. In the end I opted for a long long stick attached to one of the little claw-like rakes that you use to ‘comb’ the olives off the branches. It took me several hours to get the hang of it. And I truly feel that I could now prune the perfectly shaped olive tree. It’s all in the flick of the wrist and the hooking of the comb’s teeth over the top of each thin twig: once the tool is in place, a steady downward movement, with the twig firmly grasped, will bring every single olive along that branch plopping down into the net. If ever I get into pruning olive trees, I shall know that the falling twigs, the ones that droop like weeping willow fronds down from the thicker branches, are sheer simple bliss to rake clear: I would prune out every single upwards-rearing twig and leave only the easily-harvested ones.
The pleasure, in my case, was enhanced by the fact that our single net wasn’t nearly large enough for my purposes, so I had arranged large sheets of woven plastic down the banks beneath the olive trees, to act as slides into the net below, with its turned-up edges (a complex arrangement of cane sticks with net edges hooked over them to create a rim). The glorious thud of dozens of olives coming off each heavily-laden branch onto the plastic was sheer delight. It sounded like great fat drops of rain on dry dry earth after a long draught.Truly uplifting.
The tree in front of the kitchen yielded a basket and a bit (each full plastic container holds about 25kg) of fruit. The other five, very old and rather rickety trees filled the rest of the second container. I think I could have picked more. I certainly made no effort to get right to the tops of the trees, where birds can now have a field day. But I was tired and my neck was sore from craning up into the branches. A great, black, fast-falling storm with thunder and lightning brought my first day’s picking to a welcome end. And the following day, when L came out to help, all we did was a very perfunctory stripping of the easiest bits of what I had not already done. Two full cassette: 50kg. Half of the minimum for calling our oil our own. But I’m not proud. And at the frantoio, I had the thrill of someone coming over to Jo’s haul – now poured into just two immense casse, with our olives spread over the very top – picking up our fruit and saying “complimenti! belle olive davvero!”
The frantoio was a fine experience. At this time of year, every evening is pretty chaotic. People pick all day then pile into the frantoio as soon as the sun goes down. The presses work all through the night. In theory, you can book your slot, at a precise time. In practice, no one knows in the morning how many hundredweight they’ll have by the end of the day (rain can stop picking abruptly, a string of trees with few olives on them will slow things down), so it's quite impossible to make accurate calculations about how long it will take each load to go through the process. But Sunday night, I learned, is always the worst night of all, due to those many people who live in the city, and come up for the weekend just to pick their fruit: they have to get it done and be back in their offices the following morning. So they’re the anxious-looking ones. The others are having a ball.
Everyone considers their own olives the best. So I’m under no illusions that the same man who was so praising of my fruit then turned away to mutter something far less complimentary about them to another of the waiting olive-gatherers. You could hear the asides. “They’re far too green, what were they thinking of, picking them already?” “ Did you see all the leaves and branches? Couldn’t they have cleaned them up a bit?” “Was that fly I saw there? How did they manage to get fly in their olives if there isn’t any fly this year?” Beaming praise. Murmured criticism. And all around the fire to toast bruschette and compare yields.
Your yield is what really proves how good your olives are. Of course, it varies over the days that you’re picking, with the first, greener loads producing fewer litres per quintale and the fuller-blown ones producing more. Or so it should be. Jo’s first load had done just over 16 litres for each 100kg. For his second load – including (and I like to think because of…) mine – that went up to 18.65 litres per kilo. Another friend we bumped into at the frantoio was bragging of his record-breaking 25kg per quintale. But I saw looks of disbelief on the faces of those listening. Clearly, the unspoken consensus was that he was exaggerating wildly.
And the oil? It’s very green and very peppery. We have our (incredibly generous) share in five-litre tins, beautifully labelled, being lovingly left to settle as we rush to finish the little bits left over from last year that we had forgotten all about. Funny, when I mentioned the other day to a friend who lives nearby – a friend with no olive trees of his own – that we generally used good oil for dressing salads etc and bought any old extra virgin from the supermarket for cooking, he looked nonplussed. “You buy oil?” he said. “How strange, I don’t remember the last time I bought any oil.” And it’s true. Around here, there is such a glut, everyone produces so much of the stuff, that no one should ever have to buy a bottle in their lives. Maybe it’s good that we only have six trees after all.
After seven years of failing to pick our crop, it was a good feeling to get out there and do it. We have tried before. One year we had friends up here to help, and Lee and I spent much time arguing – as I remember – over the correct way to lay the nets out so that the olives, when knocked off the trees, didn’t just wonderwall over the top and lose themselves in the grass beyond. There was much tension in the air. In the end we picked hardly any, allowed what we had picked to rot in their red plastic baskets, then chucked them several days later. That wasn’t a good year.
Then last year (not a great year for olives) Vittorio picked the big tree in front of the kitchen, and kindly gave us a five-litre flagon of what was probably mostly his own oil.
But this year I was gripped with the desire not to let the fruit go to waste. It’s a good year. For months there hardly seemed to be an olive on the trees, then suddenly they exploded. The big tree in front of the kitchen was weighed down with them; the other trees much less so, poor old neglected things that they are, but still reasonably fruitful. The fly that crawls into olives almost every year and makes them small and shrivelled is totally absent. Everyone is picking early. The days – once the morning mist has lifted and the heavy dew dried off – are still warm and pleasant to be out in (unlike most years at olive-picking time when it tends to be bitter and grey). So with L inside working to finish an article or two, out I went, and started picking.
This time I could lay my nets as I wished: I had no one to argue net-engineering with. And of course I could get the fruit out of the trees as I wished. In the end I opted for a long long stick attached to one of the little claw-like rakes that you use to ‘comb’ the olives off the branches. It took me several hours to get the hang of it. And I truly feel that I could now prune the perfectly shaped olive tree. It’s all in the flick of the wrist and the hooking of the comb’s teeth over the top of each thin twig: once the tool is in place, a steady downward movement, with the twig firmly grasped, will bring every single olive along that branch plopping down into the net. If ever I get into pruning olive trees, I shall know that the falling twigs, the ones that droop like weeping willow fronds down from the thicker branches, are sheer simple bliss to rake clear: I would prune out every single upwards-rearing twig and leave only the easily-harvested ones.
The pleasure, in my case, was enhanced by the fact that our single net wasn’t nearly large enough for my purposes, so I had arranged large sheets of woven plastic down the banks beneath the olive trees, to act as slides into the net below, with its turned-up edges (a complex arrangement of cane sticks with net edges hooked over them to create a rim). The glorious thud of dozens of olives coming off each heavily-laden branch onto the plastic was sheer delight. It sounded like great fat drops of rain on dry dry earth after a long draught.Truly uplifting.
The tree in front of the kitchen yielded a basket and a bit (each full plastic container holds about 25kg) of fruit. The other five, very old and rather rickety trees filled the rest of the second container. I think I could have picked more. I certainly made no effort to get right to the tops of the trees, where birds can now have a field day. But I was tired and my neck was sore from craning up into the branches. A great, black, fast-falling storm with thunder and lightning brought my first day’s picking to a welcome end. And the following day, when L came out to help, all we did was a very perfunctory stripping of the easiest bits of what I had not already done. Two full cassette: 50kg. Half of the minimum for calling our oil our own. But I’m not proud. And at the frantoio, I had the thrill of someone coming over to Jo’s haul – now poured into just two immense casse, with our olives spread over the very top – picking up our fruit and saying “complimenti! belle olive davvero!”
The frantoio was a fine experience. At this time of year, every evening is pretty chaotic. People pick all day then pile into the frantoio as soon as the sun goes down. The presses work all through the night. In theory, you can book your slot, at a precise time. In practice, no one knows in the morning how many hundredweight they’ll have by the end of the day (rain can stop picking abruptly, a string of trees with few olives on them will slow things down), so it's quite impossible to make accurate calculations about how long it will take each load to go through the process. But Sunday night, I learned, is always the worst night of all, due to those many people who live in the city, and come up for the weekend just to pick their fruit: they have to get it done and be back in their offices the following morning. So they’re the anxious-looking ones. The others are having a ball.
Everyone considers their own olives the best. So I’m under no illusions that the same man who was so praising of my fruit then turned away to mutter something far less complimentary about them to another of the waiting olive-gatherers. You could hear the asides. “They’re far too green, what were they thinking of, picking them already?” “ Did you see all the leaves and branches? Couldn’t they have cleaned them up a bit?” “Was that fly I saw there? How did they manage to get fly in their olives if there isn’t any fly this year?” Beaming praise. Murmured criticism. And all around the fire to toast bruschette and compare yields.
Your yield is what really proves how good your olives are. Of course, it varies over the days that you’re picking, with the first, greener loads producing fewer litres per quintale and the fuller-blown ones producing more. Or so it should be. Jo’s first load had done just over 16 litres for each 100kg. For his second load – including (and I like to think because of…) mine – that went up to 18.65 litres per kilo. Another friend we bumped into at the frantoio was bragging of his record-breaking 25kg per quintale. But I saw looks of disbelief on the faces of those listening. Clearly, the unspoken consensus was that he was exaggerating wildly.
And the oil? It’s very green and very peppery. We have our (incredibly generous) share in five-litre tins, beautifully labelled, being lovingly left to settle as we rush to finish the little bits left over from last year that we had forgotten all about. Funny, when I mentioned the other day to a friend who lives nearby – a friend with no olive trees of his own – that we generally used good oil for dressing salads etc and bought any old extra virgin from the supermarket for cooking, he looked nonplussed. “You buy oil?” he said. “How strange, I don’t remember the last time I bought any oil.” And it’s true. Around here, there is such a glut, everyone produces so much of the stuff, that no one should ever have to buy a bottle in their lives. Maybe it’s good that we only have six trees after all.