Like most olive farmers in the northern hemisphere, we actually begin to make our oil each year around the time of the spring equinox in March. If that seems early, it’s just at that point that one of the most important activities of the entire season takes place—pruning and fertilizing the trees.
We don’t prune each and every tree every year, although some producers do, especially those with dense, super-intensive olive orchards, the trees planted in such close hedgerows that they look from a distance like a vineyard. (In fact, this is sometimes referred to as “hedgerow planting.”) Unlike a traditional olive orchard, a super-intensive grove is designed for mechanical pruning and harvesting, using equipment similar to that originally developed for mechanical cultivation of vineyards. For this reason, the trees must be pruned every year to keep them tight and compact. Mechanically pruning and harvesting, proponents of super-intensive cultivation say, saves enormously on labor expense, even if the oil produced by these methods isn’t prime quality and the environmental costs, in water use and pollution, can be defeating. (For a more detailed discussion of super-high-density planting, see the sidebar.)
But our labor, like that of most producers of premium olive oil, is all by hand—and mostly our own two (or four, or six) hands. Because of that, we prune half our trees one year, and half the following, then wait a few years before starting again. While we’re pruning, cutting out excess wood that won’t bear fruit, nipping back suckers and shoots that spring from the base of the tree, we’re also fertilizing, giving each pruned tree a good dose of an organic fertilizer guaranteed to help the tree recover from its surgery and boost it into healthy production of fruit.
“It’s not really a tree, the olive, it’s a bush, or it wants to become a bush,” Gemma Pasquali, my latest (and youngest-ever) olive guru, tells me: Our job as olive farmers, she says, is to keep them from doing that. With a PhD in agronomics from the University of Florence and post-doc work in plant genetics at the University of Florida, Gemma knows what she’s talking about. Her own trees at Villa Campestri in the Mugello, north of Florence, are pruned to keep them shapely, to open the inside of each tree to the light, and to make the eventual fruits easier to harvest. And also, she says, pointing out to me one of her elderly Frantoio trees, they are pruned into the vase shape that is traditional in Tuscany, to keep them from degenerating into bushes as they are wont to do. This particular tree was knocked down by the infamous freeze in 1986 that struck olive groves all over Central Italy and extended as far as Provence. “The base didn’t die,” Gemma says, “but the trunk did and it’s painful. You have to wait many years for it to grow back.” There are four sturdy limbs now growing from the base where the trunk was cut back after the freeze. They look like four separate trees, though united at the base, and almost 30 years later they are producing plenty of oil.
The olive tree’s vascular system, just like that in humans, transports nutrients, in the tree’s case from its roots deep underground up to the foliage and fruits; at the same time, carbohydrates formed from photosynthesis are carried from the leaves back down. When the vascular system is damaged—by frost or disease, or by improper pruning—it leaves a wound that can prevent the system from operating properly. The beauty of olive trees, at least for painters and tourists if not necessarily for olive farmers, is in their gnarled and twisted shapes created by age and the afflictions of time. Venerable old olives often split open, hollowing their trunks or giving the appearance of three or more trees growing intertwined, yet within the structure is a single tree, its vascular system continuing to operate on the outside of the trunk, its limbs continuing to bear. “The amount of genetic information in this one tree,” says Gemma, “is just amazing.” She explains that a tree this ancient is not just a Frantoio cultivar but that it also has absorbed genetic information from the whole population of trees that neighbor it on this high Mediterranean savanna.
Olive trees, icons of the Mediterranean, really want to run wild, and if you don’t keep taming them, that’s exactly what they will do. I noted earlier that archeologists, looking at carbonized olive pits from ancient digs, find it difficult to differentiate between pits from domesticated olives and those from wild plants, or between wild and feral plants—trees that were once cultivated and have reverted to the wild. The semi-wild trees sprouting on abandoned land around our hill-country farm are telling witnesses to that process. Without the discipline of pruning, their fruit is skimpy, small, and bitter—or nonexistent. It makes me realize that the olive tree is similar to Indian corn (maize) in that it exists in an intimate symbiosis with humankind. Without human intervention, neither corn nor olives would thrive. Both plants depend to a great extent on humans for their continued existence, just as their human cultivators also depend on them. In The Botany of Desire, Michael Pollan described this mutual interdependence, this synergy, in terms that suggested that perhaps it’s a mistake to speak of humankind domesticating certain plants. Rather, he argued, it may be the case that certain plants have domesticated us instead.
But olive trees, unlike corn, even when they have apparently ceased production completely, can be reborn, as my old journalist colleague Mort Rosenblum has shown on the farm he bought on a steep Provençal hillside some years ago. Mort and his wife, Jeannette, through rigorous pruning, generous fertilizing, and backbreaking labor for a desk-bound journalist, have successfully pruned, hacked, and chain-sawed back into productivity a hundred or more “wild” olive trees that had been abandoned years earlier. Mort, who has a gift for naming, calls his place Wild Olives, which, he notes, if pronounced with a French accent, comes out sounding much like huile d’olive. And he’s very happy with an annual yield of around 50 liters of opulent, excellent oil.[1]
It’s difficult to understand what excellent oil is all about, and why it’s so expensive, until you begin to comprehend the method, from start to finish, by which it is made, the step-by-step chain that links each stage to the next and the critical points in that chain that determine success or failure. The process really does begin in March, with pruning and fertilizing, well before the new growth emerges. Well-rotted sheep manure is what old-timers always recommend to spread beneath the olive trees—la crème de la crème of manures, Alice Toklas called it, writing years ago about her garden in France. I would prefer sheep manure to our commercial organic fertilizer, but it’s hard to find. Until the years after World War II, when rural life throughout Tuscany changed forever, sheep were plentiful up in these hills, part of every farm’s endowment. Our village, Teverina, used to host a sizeable sheep fair every August where farmers traded lambs, along with fresh ricotta and pungent pecorino cheeses made from their mothers’ milk, but today there are almost no sheep farmers left anywhere around. Getting manure means a trek to a far distant sheep farm and hiring a wagon of some sort to haul it back to Pian d’Arcello. It’s a lot easier to dip a gloved hand into a big plastic sack of clean organic fertilizer and swirl it around each tree’s roots.
The wild boar also do a great job of cultivating our trees. They obviously adore the olive orchard, because they’re out disporting themselves in it almost every night. Fortunately the trees are big enough now and sufficiently sturdy that the boar do no damage when they use the trunks as back-scratching posts. If I wake at three or four in the morning when the moon is full, I can see from my bedroom window their hulking shadows wading through the meadow grasses as they steadily munch on whatever it is that tickles the boarish palate—roots, no doubt, and grubs and, my neighbors say, any sort of lizard, snake, or viper eggs they come across, thus helping to keep the viper population under control. The boars’ deposits fertilize the trees, and at the same time their grunting grub work helps to turn over the soil.
Weather-wise, March is often the worst time of the year up where we are, on the high dividing line between Tuscany and Umbria. Pruning trees is fun when days are warm and sunny, even with an occasional spring shower, but much of the time cold rain, lashed by the wind, drives us indoors before nightfall. When it’s a harsh winter—and winters are more severe now than when I first came here in the 1970s—the harshness is most piercing in February and March. Last winter the snow came in February, stunning everyone, first with its beauty; it’s not often that you get to see this countryside, where every vista seems set to provide the backdrop for a Renaissance Annunciation or Nativity scene, made even more enchanting by a thick blanket of white. (“Ha visto la neve, signora?” Margherita in the bottega asks me: “Have you seen the snow?” Well, honestly, Margherita, how could I have missed it—it’s a meter deep in the field behind the house!) But once folks had got somewhat accustomed to the beauty, then the worries set in—the isolation (many farmhouses were unreachable for weeks), the cold (temperatures went below zero Celsius and stayed there, also for weeks), and the effects on the olive trees.
By the time spring finally rolled around, they had new worries: We didn’t have any rain all winter, just snow, people said, so it’s gonna be a dry summer, bad for olives. I could have recited the old Maine farmer’s litany about snow, especially late snow, which back in New England is called “poor man’s fertilizer,” because it melts slowly and carries moisture and nourishment deep into the soil. Much better than the usual driving winter rainstorms of Central Italy, the runoff from which simply carries precious nutrients down into the streams. But I didn’t because I knew no one would believe me. Still, by May the olive trees had come back in force and were covered in glorious drifts of tiny, almost insignificant white blossoms that looked like cotton fluff (or snow) on the branches. From our perspective, it seemed like the beginning of a better-than-ever year for olives.
The beauty of growing olives is this: Once the hard work of pruning and fertilizing is over, there’s really not much more to do until late summer or early autumn. Old Columella recognized that back in the third century CE: The olive “is held in high esteem because it is maintained by light cultivation and, when it is not covered with fruit, it calls for scarcely any expenditure,” he counseled.[2] Less work, less worry, less cost, especially when compared to vines or grains, the other staple crops of the Mediterranean.
Of course, Columella’s received wisdom fails to mitigate the conscientious farmer’s anxieties as she checks on the swelling buds throughout April and the flowering in May. The grass in the orchard gets cut two or three times through the spring and summer months, and some farmers turn the soil beneath the trees as well. I don’t because I’m convinced that this practice simply dries out the earth. Our trees need every drop of moisture they can find.
What about irrigation then? When the trees were young and just getting established, we watered them well, but we stopped once they were on their way to adolescence. Irrigation is a way to reduce the olive tree’s rather irritating habit of producing in alternate years—one year abundance, the next year skimpy, and so on. In this, olives are not unlike other fruit trees, especially apples and pears. Commercial producers, who want to ensure a steady supply of olives year in and year out, irrigate to give a good-size crop every year, and super-intensive producers must rely on irrigation just to keep trees alive. But there is growing evidence that the quality of the oil suffers. A study developed at the University of Extremadura, funded by Spain’s National Research Institute for Agriculture and Food Technology, confirmed that reducing irrigation, while it produces a smaller harvest, actually produces a higher-quality oil with greater concentration of phenolic compounds,[3] confirming what the old-timers say. Irrigating, they all concur, will make a less pungent oil, and pungency is a valued quality, especially here in Tuscany, where our oils are noted for a sharp kick in the back of the throat that leads unwary tasters to cough.
Such pungency is an indication of the presence of the polyphenols that contribute to olive oil’s beneficial power in our diets, so it’s something we want in olive oil. Polyphenols also give the oil great staying power, meaning that, if the oil is stored correctly, it can keep, undisturbed, even for three or four years. (This is not true of bottled oils on supermarket shelves, which almost invariably are not stored correctly.) New World farmers in South America, Australia, and California, many of them with high-density plantations, are big on irrigation, but, says my neighbor Brian Chatterton, an Australian who grows olives in Umbria, optimum oil production comes about when olives get less water.
Besides, I’m convinced that the olive tree evolved to fit a typical Mediterranean environment with long, dry summers—and if that’s the way nature intended olives to be, that’s the route I want to follow.
So our olives grow and flourish throughout the warm Tuscan summer. By late June, where once there were flowers, there are miniature olives, hard green babies. In hotter climates—in Sicily and southern Spain, in Tunisia and Palestine, on the island of Crete and the Aegean coast—the olives not only flower earlier, but they also grow much more rapidly. By the solstice, their olives are double or triple the size of ours in Central Italy. But at summer’s height, no matter where you are in the olive world, hail is what’s most feared. In August, when dark thunderclouds loom on the western horizon, we cross our fingers, cross ourselves, light candles, say prayers, do whatever juju seems called for to keep away a damaging summer ice storm that could leave fruits so battered they’re good for nothing when it’s time to harvest. Mold, insects, diseases—they all love the rot that comes from battered fruit. One of the worst threats for many farmers is the olive fly, Bactrocera oleae, a marvelously evolved insect that has existed for as long as olive trees have and does major damage to the fruits when it invades a grove. Damaged fruit is no way to make good oil, but avaricious farmers, eager to wring every drop of oil, good or bad, from their olives, still bring to the mill sacks full of fetid olives to be converted into oil that can never qualify as extra-virgin. Olive oil, the experts often say, unlike wine, is made in the field and not at the mill. To a large extent they’re right. You can manipulate poor-quality wine through fermentation and aging, you can add sugar to boost the alcohol, but you can’t do a thing with bad olives except make bad oil.
Up to this point, we’ve not done much with our olives that Columella would not have recommended. In fact, any of those Roman farmers, and even Greek Hesiod, the oldest agronomist of all, would doubtless look on our inconsiderable labors and approve, despite the fertilizer that comes out of a plastic sack instead of the business end of a sheep. But by autumn, things start to change, and one of the major changes, one that is a critical determinant between excellent oil and indifferent oil, is the time of harvest. It is true that Cato and Columella, among other ancient writers, insisted on the virtues of an early harvest, when the olives were not fully mature, but this smart and sensible practice seems to have been ignored by most growers, then and since, in favor of quantity. Later harvests give more oil; earlier harvests give better oil. For most farmers throughout history and even today, it has not even been a toss-up—quantity wins over quality every time. But those times are changing.
Jean-Marie Baldassari is a Provençal consultant who works with producers in underserved parts of the olive oil world to help boost the quality of their production. Over the years, he has spent many seasons in Palestine, where olives and their oil are both an economic resource and a compelling symbol of Palestinian culture and history. I watched him in action one hot day in mid-October at a mill in Burqin, near Palestine’s northern border with Israel. He was instructing a group of a dozen or so youngish men, jointly called the shabab or “the boys,” who work in and around the mill, which is run by a cooperative called Canaan Fair Trade; most of the shabab are also farmers, members of the cooperative who bring their olives here to be processed. “Your olives,” Baldassari explained in French, drawing a graph on the whiteboard behind him, “reach organoleptic maturity in the first half of October and then they begin to decline. But the oil matures, it reaches a peak, and the yield is greatest between mid-October and mid-November. The organoleptic maturity precedes by several days the optimum yield—and that”—he jabbed a finger at the point on the graph—“that’s when you need to harvest.”
Collectively, the shabab were somewhat incredulous. Growers in Italy and France deliberately harvest for lower yield? “Yes,” affirmed Jean-Marie decisively: “You renounce yield, some of it at least, for the sake of quality and flavor in the oil.”
This has been a difficult notion for many oil producers, not just Palestinians, to comprehend. For generations, indeed for millennia, the goal has been quantity and not necessarily quality. After all, the oil had to last for two years, given the olive tree’s disquieting habit of producing well only in alternate years. To be safe, a farmer had to have enough oil in the family cellar to last until the next good harvest, and moreover enough surplus to sell in order to tuck gold coins under the family mattress. In Central Italy, as the old nonna at an Umbrian mill explained to me, the harvest traditionally took place fra la Madonna e Candelora, meaning between the Feast of the Immaculate Conception on December 8 (la Madonna) and Candelora on February 2, the purification of the virgin after the birth of Christ (also Groundhog Day).[4] By February, olives in Umbria are going to be thoroughly ripe and black, weeping oil, possibly having suffered more than one freeze, if not actually shriveling on the trees. Nonetheless, that’s when people have traditionally harvested, at least in part because that’s when the oil content of the fruits appeared to be at its peak.[5] At that stage, it is almost impossible to make good oil.
In Puglia, the heel of Italy’s boot, where about 60 percent of all the oil in Italy is produced in any given year (and much of that of indifferent quality), farmers still today attach orange-colored nets beneath their trees and leave them there, suspended from the branches, to catch ripened olives as they fall. The nets stay in place throughout the season. When enough olives have collected to make a big enough load for the mill, the farmer bundles the whole lot up and takes it off to the frantoio, replacing the nets under the trees for another session of falling olives. This practice lasts until all the olives have detached themselves from the tree and been “harvested.” Problematically, olives start to deteriorate the minute they are separated from the mother tree. (In this, they are not unlike apples and oranges, although the decline with olives is much more rapid than with any other fruit I can think of.) Like fish in the bottom of the boat, olives might well sit in the bottom of the net for a couple of weeks, festering and fermenting and infecting the more recent windfalls so that no good oil can ever come out of it.
Back in ancient Greece, methods were no less elementary. In a practice that continues in some regions to this day, Greek farmers harvested by beating the olives out of the trees with long reed sticks or poles, as evidenced by a marvelously vigorous black-figure amphora from the late sixth century BCE in the British Museum. The vase, which was actually found near Viterbo in Etruscan Italy, shows three trees, high in one of which a boy has perched, the better to beat the olives out of the tree. Two men are also knocking the branches with long poles, while another lad harvests the fallen olives from the ground beneath the tree. Though I’m told on good authority that farmers in some parts of Greece continue to do this, it is not recommended since the olives, in order to detach themselves, must be super-mature; and then, of course, even if they are undamaged, they will not produce good oil.
Another widespread tradition, one I’ve mentioned earlier that is still practiced in many Mediterranean regions, is that of piling the olives up in a corner of the farmyard, or even at the olive mill, in the vain expectation that the yield in oil will be greater if the olives dry for two or three weeks. There is no way to increase the amount of oil in an olive once it has reached its peak. Instead, the amount of water in the olives diminishes as they dry out, so the yield of oil per weight of olives may appear to be greater but in fact it is exactly the same as it would have been had the olives been pressed fresh. Except of course that the quality of the oil suffers enormously from this treatment. The olives start to ferment and rancidify and, again, no good oil will come from them. But since the miller is actually paid by the weight of the olives and not by the quantity of oil, a canny farmer will try to beat down the price by deliberately reducing the weight of his crop.
Despite all these nefarious time- and tradition-honored practices, there have always been some few farmers who harvested earlier, when the fruits were starting to change color, no longer completely green nor yet completely black, but a mixture of some green, some black, and some olives that are streaked with darker rays as the fruits began to mature—a stage called by the pretty Italian term invaiatura. The better Tuscan producers were and are especially noted for harvesting olives early to produce green oils with rich and complex aromas and flavors, oils with a pleasingly pungent bite and a degree of bitterness to balance the sweetness of the fruit. Often these early harvest oils were set aside for family use, or for the landlord. Science confirms that this oil is not only better tasting but also better for you, with a higher content of the polyphenols that bring countless health benefits along with appealing flavors. And because of the high content of polyphenols (for a discussion of polyphenols, see Chapter 5), the oil has a much longer shelf life—which may have been what motivated those canny old Tuscan farmers in the first place.
“As the olive matures,” Baldassari explained to his rapt but still skeptical group of Palestinian farmers, “the aromas change from greenness to nuttiness, and that moment of change is also the point of polyphenolic concentration. Today’s market is looking for oils that are very rich in polyphenols—the contest in the oil is between fruitiness and bitterness.” Depending on the region and the climate, as well as on the individual variety, that moment could come anytime between the first of October and the middle of November. And still, even in Tuscany with its rather advanced theories about olive culture, there are farmers who won’t even enter the olive groves, let alone start harvesting, before St. Martin’s Day, San Martino, on November 11.
When we first came to live in Tuscany in the 1970s, no frantoio, or olive mill, ever opened before the middle of November. In other parts of the Mediterranean such as Andalusia, it was often as late as mid-December before the harvest began, and it lasted until well into March. Since that time, there has been a determined move toward earlier and earlier harvests, as a direct consequence of market demand for higher-quality oil. A producer in the Cilento, on the Italian coast south of Naples, I was told, even harvests olives during the first week of September to make an oil described as “explosive” with bitterness—and no wonder: At that stage, olive oil is simply medicine, nothing more or less. As Baldassari explained to the Palestinian farmers, striking the balance between peak flavor and peak yield, and between the fruitiness of oil from rich, ripe olives and the pungency and bitterness of that from immature ones, has become a juggling act for conscientious olive oil producers all over the world.
Timing of the harvest, in fact, is one major reason for the immense quantities of indifferent oil coming out of southern Spain. In Andalusia, where a good 40 percent of the entire world’s olive oil is made each year, the reach of olive groves is breathtaking, truly awesome; they carpet the rolling land in all directions, as far as the eye can see from a very high hill. But it is simply impossible to harvest all that fruit early and to process it promptly—the capacity of the groves to produce fruit far exceeds the capacity of the mills to make oil. So the harvest in southern Spain continues over months, with fruit growing ever riper on the trees while harvested olives pile up at the mills, waiting their turn to be processed and deteriorating as they wait.
American olive expert Paul Vossen, who works with the University of California’s Cooperative Extension Service, calls this “the infamous Picual controversy.” Something like 80 percent of the vast olive plantations of Spain are devoted to Picual, a cultivar that, when harvested late, as it most frequently is, makes an oil that, according to this expert, “tastes and smells . . . to trained olive oil tasters” overripe and defective, “with a very distinctive flavor described kindly as ‘eucalyptus.’” And because so much of the world’s olive oil comes from Spain, and so much Spanish oil comes from defective, overripe Picual olives, the fusty flavor and often rancid smell of that oil are what many consumers confidently assume are the characteristic flavors and smells of properly made olive oil. The result is a little like children who grow up never tasting anything but orange juice made from frozen concentrate. Give them a sip of truly fresh, just-squeezed juice and they turn their little noses up at the taste. So too with olive oil: It’s predictable and even understandable that, for millions of consumers for whom the flavor of overripe, fusty Picual is the “true” flavor of olive oil, a well-made oil with its balance of fruity, pungent, and bitter flavors will be not only incomprehensible but downright disagreeable.
In fairness, I should point out that there are a number of Andalusian producers who control their own production from start to finish, harvesting at the right moment and pressing immediately, and consequently turn out excellent oils from Picual olives that stand out in any competition anywhere in the world. Castillo de Canena is one such brand, while Almazaras de la Subbetica, Manuel Montes Marin’s Portico de la Villa, Oleum Viride from Zahara de la Sierra in the far west of Andalusia, and Melgarejo from Aceites Campoliva are others. And there are more. Still, at least 80 percent of Andalusian olive oil is, speaking as kindly as possible, quite ordinary when it’s not out-and-out defective. And much of the fault lies in delayed harvesting.
Global climate change has also affected the time of harvest. Unusually harsh winters in many parts of the Mediterranean are only part of the story; Mediterranean summers are drier, hotter, and longer than ever, lasting well into the autumn. It worries Paco Vañó, who makes Castillo de Canena’s prize-winning oils, including an excellent monocultivar Picual (thus proving that it is entirely possible to make a first-rate oil from this problematic olive[6]). In order to initiate the enzymatic process called lipogenesis, when oil begins to swell in the olives on the trees, Paco told me, you need autumn rains and lower temperatures—10°C (50°F) for at least a couple of hours every night. In his rustic old Land Rover, we were bouncing across the deeply rutted roads that connect a few of the 3,750 acres of olive trees he maintains. It was late September, and he kept glancing at the outside temperature gauge on the dashboard. By then, pre-dawn temperatures should have been down in the 10°C mark and summer’s heat a distant memory. “But look,” he continued, pointing at the thermometer, which was hovering around 30°C, “it’s still summer weather. Strange times.”
Strange times, indeed! Not only hot summer temperatures extending into autumn, but also ongoing drought, only occasionally relieved by torrential rainfall (almost as damaging as drought), have had serious implications for Andalusian agriculture in general and for olives and oil in particular. The region, a broad belt that extends across southern Spain, produces annually between 30 and 40 percent of the world’s olive oil. With the rains and cooling temperatures of autumn, Vañó said, the oil should start to increase while the critical content of polyphenols, which determine much of the flavors in the oil, optimizes. In the Picual cultivar, that means a softening of flavor. Harvested too green, Picual olives give an overwhelmingly bitter oil; too ripe and the oil will taste too much of what California’s Vossen politely called “eucalyptus.” At the moment where greenness and ripeness balance each other, just as Baldassari pointed out to his Palestinian students, a smart farmer can get the maximum yield of oil rich in polyphenols. Just a week or 10 days later, while the oil may have increased in quantity, the quality will be diminished.
Timing the harvest accurately can also affect particular flavors in many oils, as Mirko Sella, a young producer in the hills northeast of Verona, found out. Grignano is an obscure variety grown widely in this very restricted area and until recently was not held in particularly high regard. But Sella, working with agronomists at the University of Padua, discovered that for a particular three-week period in October, Grignano olives produce an oil with a refreshingly citrus or tart apple flavor that is no longer apparent when the olives are left to mature. Now he bottles his October-harvested oil as Grignano Monte Guala, and it is increasingly prized by fastidious collectors.
There are still some philosophical holdouts against early harvesting, however. Those are producers whose goal is a bland and unaggressive oil without the assertive flavors most knowledgeable consumers are looking for. Late November is considered an appropriate time to start the harvest in Liguria, along the Italian Riviera, and in much of the south of France, where olive picking may well go on, a few days at a time, throughout the winter. Traditionalists in regions from Italy’s Cinque Terre around through Liguria and into Provence, even down into the Catalan coast of Spain, vaunt the quality of their oil, usually a rich golden color, indicating that it’s pressed from fully ripened olives. When it’s well made, the oil has a pronounced fruity taste but not much depth of flavor and no challenging complexities. It has no staying power, and the olive cultivars that are grown in these regions, particularly Taggiasca from Liguria and Arbequina from Catalonia, are characteristically low in polyphenols even at their peak. Ligurian gastronomes claim the bland, sweet flavor of their Taggiasca oil is an ideal condiment for the seafood that is such a feature of local cuisine, and they may be right. Still, most connoisseurs today are looking for the complexity and intensity of early harvested oil from cultivars rich in polyphenolic content.
Last year we started picking at the end of October, when the weather was still balmy but autumn skies were lowering, metallic clouds stretching across our high valley in layers heavy with rain. Never harvest olives in the rain, Gemma Pasquali tells me: It’s bad for the trees, bad for the olives, and bad for the pickers. Wet olives develop mold and the moldy flavor will contaminate the oil, giving it the negative characteristic that official tasters call “musty”—which is exactly the flavor of the oil that my Tuscan neighbors produced back in the old days. For the same reason, we don’t harvest early in the morning, not until the dew has dried on the trees. So we rush to get the olives in after they have dried and before rain begins to fall and wreak havoc with our harvest. The rough wicker baskets that we strap around our waists with a piece of rope or an old belt are shaped like a curving quarter of a globe. I buy them from the old man who makes them himself by hand and brings them to the Thursday market in Camucia, where he sells them for €35 (about $45 at this writing). We pick rapidly, using a two-handed downward motion that a Cortonese farmwife described to me as “milking” the olives, showering the fruits down into our baskets or a broad net tucked under each tree as we proceed through the orchard. There are six of us working together at the beginning of the week, but the crew quickly expands to eight and then ten, the house overflowing, and then we contract back to six again. The pickers include various relatives, friends, neighbors, and assorted hangers-on—in fact, anyone who says, as many people do, “Gee, I’d love to come help you pick olives.”
And when the rain comes, we stop and wait. And we cross our fingers and hope.
The second day of picking, the weather clears, and we get down to it with serious intent. But then the clocks are set back to winter time and the sun goes down behind the high ridge of the Cerventosa by 4:30, cutting the day extremely short. Under such constraints, it takes a lot of enthusiastic hands to assemble the 440 pounds of olives we need in order to do a single pressing without combining our olives with someone else’s.
Picking by hand is an agonizingly slow process, and there are constant efforts to improve it and speed it up. Some growers harvest mechanically, using battery-operated plastic combs that vibrate along the branches, agitating the olives and knocking them off. There’s even a dinosaur-like machine that embraces the whole trunk and shakes it brutally so the olives drop into a giant inverted umbrella beneath. Even if I could afford such a machine, I wouldn’t use it—it damages the olives, and damaged olives won’t produce good oil. Moreover, the olives have to be very ripe before they’ll drop off the tree, even with the violent shaking the machine produces. Some folks like to use plastic combs to rake down the branches, but that rakes off leaves as well, which then have to be removed before the olives can be processed. I have a set of hollowed-out goat horns that I bought in the market in Sfax, one of the centers of Tunisian olive oil production—you put one horn on your index finger, one on your middle finger, and rake down the branches like that. My friend Deborah, who grows olives in the next valley over, used to seek out used opera gloves in Paris flea markets; they made good hand protectors, with the tips of the fingers cut away. But the market in opera gloves seems to have dried up, like so many onetime accoutrements of the good life.
So we pick, family and friends together, going tree by tree, spreading the nets, moving ladders, talking, telling stories, listening, stopping for a quick lunch under the trees and a fortifying swig of rosso toscano before we go back to work again. Each day ends at sundown as we amble slowly back to the house and tip our final basket-loads into the airy plastic bins in which the fruit will be carried to the mill.
I think of a Robert Frost poem I’ve always loved, “After Apple Picking”:
For I have had too much
Of olive-picking: I am overtired
Of the great harvest I myself desired.
There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch,
Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall.
(Apologies to the poet.)
In the end, it took us four days to complete the harvest.
What actually determines the quality of an extra-virgin olive oil? The care and cleanliness with which olives are grown, harvested, and pressed is one big part of the equation. The variety of olives used and their stage of maturity when picked is another. How carefully the oil is stored is also very important. But these are specifics. The two most critical factors in producing high-quality olive oil, the two issues that enter into the picture throughout and most affect the outcome, from the first olive picked to the last drop of oil out of the frantoio, are more generalized:
Time.
And temperature.
Time means speed—speed of harvest, speed in getting olives to the mill, speed in milling the oil. “Olive oil is like music,” Tunisian producer Majid Mahjoub told me a few years ago. His family company, Moulins Mahjoub, makes an apple green and fragrant oil from their own groves of Chetoui olives in the Mejerda Valley, west of Tunis. Majid is a philosopher at heart who spends a lot of time thinking—and then linking his thoughts in unlikely ways. So what does he mean, like music? “Music is an expression of time,” Majid explained. “It’s a way of controlling time. And you can’t make quality oil without controlling time—time of harvest, when olives are turning from green to black; time between picking and pressing; time the oil sits in storage before it’s used. All this means the difference between great oil and, um, not so great.”
The temperature factor is equally important. We hear a lot about the virtues of “cold pressed extra-virgin olive oil,” but in fact all extra-virgin olive oil is or should be expressed at temperatures below 27°C (about 80°F)—otherwise it cannot be called extra-virgin. And the oil will be much better if the entire process takes place at temperatures far below that mark. (Recently, I was introduced to a new marketing term, “ice-pressed” oil—I hope the producer was not planning actually to freeze the olives; that would seriously damage them and make any oil obtained highly questionable.) Maintaining temperatures at or below 27°C might seem easy enough, but in fact temperature is often the most difficult factor to control. In the Palestinian olive groves I visited recently, for instance, the daytime temperature in October was well above 30°C (90°F), so the harvested olives were consistently, inevitably, and unavoidably exposed to undesirable temperatures.[7] And the same holds true in many other parts of the Mediterranean. With all the care in the world, rushing to the mill with tenderly handled, scrupulously clean olives, the oil still inevitably suffers when temperatures soar.
Another function of time: To make good olive oil, the olives must be pressed as quickly as possible, ideally, experts say, within 24 to 48 hours of harvest. Commercial producers are constantly pushing the envelope, trying to reduce the gap. Many of the big producers I’ve visited in California and Chile claim the olives go into the crushing machines less than an hour or so after they have been picked. Throughout the Mediterranean, fine producers like Priego de Cordoba in Spain or Titone, near Marsala in the west of Sicily, make sure each day’s harvest is processed that evening before the next day’s harvest begins. For small operations like our own, this is not as easy as it sounds. Like most olive mills, the mill we use on the Arezzo road just north of Cortona, Frantoio Landi, requires at least two quintales (200 kilos, or 440 pounds) of olives to make a single pressing. Any less and our olives must be mixed with someone else’s, and there’s no guarantee that those other olives will be any good. So if we arrive at the mill with less than the stipulated quantity, we risk contaminating our beautiful, clean, fresh olives with those from some much less fastidious farmer.
I would love to say that we proudly get our olives to the mill within 12 or 24 hours of picking them, but the truth is quite a bit broader. Usually it takes us four days—and that’s four days of brilliant autumn weather, golden from sunrise to sunset—to accumulate 440 pounds of olives, even with ten pairs of hands at work. Days are short, weather threatens, and even the most good-hearted helper is, after all, simply that—a helper and not a paid employee that the manager can fire if he or she slacks off.
Most of the loyal clients of Mr. Landi’s mill are like us, small individual producers making oil for their own uses and perhaps a little to sell on the side. Despite the reputation of Lucca as home to some of the industry’s major global firms, like Bertolli and Filippo Berio, the true backbone of Tuscan oil is the output of much smaller enterprises, including some very well-known and prestigious brands that market internationally and are often also home to Tuscany’s finest wines. They might be a good deal larger than our mini farm, but still, to Californian and Spanish advocates of super-technological, super-high-density olive oil assembly, the individualist, small-scale, family-size production in Central Italy looks hopelessly old-fashioned and backward. Even at renowned estates like Badia a Coltibuono, Castello Volpaia, Frescobaldi, and Capezzana, this small scale is maintained—and these and similar family units produce some of the very finest and most prestigious olive oils on the market.
I favor the Landi mill especially because it offers a choice between the old-fashioned crush-and-press sort of operation and modern, continuous-cycle, stainless-steel machinery. Until just a few years ago, almost all the mills in Tuscany and Umbria that catered to small producers were the old style. Traditionalists continued to hold sway throughout Italy much longer than elsewhere in the olive oil world. It was still crush-and-press even back in the 1990s, when, wherever else I traveled in the Mediterranean—in Spain, in Tunisia, in Greece—what I found were mills that proudly vaunted clean, modern, continuous-cycle machinery, much of which, ironically, was actually made in Italy even if it wasn’t much used there. Two firms in particular were evident, Rapanelli from Florence and Pieralisi from Jesi on the Adriatic, and they continue to this day to be in the vanguard, covering the world market for oil-processing machinery, although Alfa-Laval, a Swedish concern, also has made great inroads. Gruppo Pieralisi, a family firm in business since 1888, leads with 60 percent of the market. The smallest continuous-cycle machine made by Pieralisi today costs a bit less than €30,000—or a bit more than $50,000—which is a quick answer to the frequently asked question: “How come you don’t have your own olive press at home?”
One other system for extracting oil should be mentioned. Once heralded as a solution for producing the very highest quality of oil, this system, called sinolea, has not acquired the following that was once predicted, although it is still talked about. It is the gentlest possible method of extraction, made by inserting thin steel blades into the olive paste. The blades drip oil, but drip is truly the word for it—drop by drop the oil slowly accumulates in a process that is almost meditative in its agonizing pace.
Old-fashioned mills are precious relics if only because they are directly descended from the ancient Roman trapetum. Two or three giant stone wheels, standing on their edges, turn steadily around a central axle on a wide basin, at the same time that each wheel turns on its own axis. The olives, previously rinsed of orchard dust and with the leaves blown away, are dumped into the big basin and the wheels turn, slowly crushing the olives, pits and all, to an oily mash the dark color of mud. (The aromas, however, that arise from the mash are seductive and not mud-like at all—in fact, it’s sort of like the appetizing fragrance of a good tapenade.) When the olive mash or paste has reached the right consistency at the Landi mill, it is piped into the malaxer, or kneading machine, a long metal box, open at the top, that contains a slowly turning double screw. This is a critical element in the production cycle, Mr. Landi explains. Crushing the olives in the mill has emulsified the oil and vegetable water inside each fruit, so the malaxer’s job is to separate these two and over the course of 30 to 40 minutes to tease the minuscule droplets of oil into larger drops that will be more easily and efficiently separated in the press. Once that point has been reached, the paste is spread directly onto broad circular mats, made of plastic woven to imitate the esparto grass that was once used. The plastic mats are stacked as they are filled, one on top of the other, to make a tower or castello. Every six mats or so, a steel plate is inserted to maintain the stability of the tower, which is then towed on a cart to a hydraulic press. There the stack of paste-covered mats is gently but firmly squeezed for at least 40 minutes or as long as an hour while the vegetation liquid gushes out and down over the mats and the oil oozes slowly forth, drop by precious drop.
Years ago, I visited an olive mill in a Tunisian desert oasis that operated on very much the same principal as Mr. Landi’s old-fashioned mill. In fact, the oasis setup would have been familiar to the long-ago residents of Volubilis in Morocco, where you can still see the ancient Roman olive-processing machinery that has been in place there since the last Roman soldier-farmer left at the end of the third century. At the Tunisian oasis, I was told by officials from the International Olive Oil Council (IOOC) who had arranged the visit, the villagers, olive farmers all, still spread their olives on the flat roofs of their houses and keep them for a full year before pressing. Even though it wasn’t the right season, the mill had been set into operation for the benefit of me and a couple of other visiting journalists. It was tucked into a low-ceilinged cave, and the grindstone—there was only one in this case—that crushed the olives was powered by a blindfolded camel plodding slowly in an unending circle round and round as the mangy beast turned the crushing wheel. Presumably the camel added certain flavors to the volatile paste. In any case, when later at lunch I was presented with a little dish of the oil and reached for it, the swift arm of an IOOC official grabbed my hand and pulled me back. “No,” he muttered, “don’t touch that. It could be dangerous.”
Even if operated by a conscientious producer like my Mr. Landi, there are other disadvantages to this system. First of all, it’s slow, and because it’s slow, olives tend to pile up at the mill. Even if your olives are perfect and clean, picked at exactly the right stage of maturity, and you’ve struggled to get them to the mill within hours of harvest, you may still have to wait your turn, sometimes as much as a day or even more. Then throughout the time the olives are being crushed, the paste is exposed to air and consequently oxidizing. And even more exposure takes place during the hour or so that the mats are stacked up in the hydraulic press. All told, the olives are subjected to much greater risks from oxidation. If, moreover, your olives are next in line for processing after a farmer who is a good deal less scrupulous than you, and if the mats and the grindstones alike have not been meticulously cleaned after use (a requirement that is seldom honored in the bustle of an olive mill at the height of the season), you risk contaminating your oil with thoroughly undesirable aromas and flavors from the batch produced by the negligent farmer who proceeded you.
In the early 1990s, before I even thought about planting trees and making oil, I often helped friends with their harvest. Olives got picked over the course of weeks rather than days, so they might arrive at the mill already ten days old, tightly crammed into burlap sacks. And there they would sit, waiting their turn, throughout the slow process of producing oil. The great stone wheels turned slowly, steadily, night and day without cease throughout the period of the harvest, but the process was so slow that big burlap sacks crammed with olives backed up, stacked willy-nilly at the entrance to the mill. Everything was orderly but nothing was very clean—there simply was no time for cleanliness in the frantic rush to get the olives crushed. You left your olives in sacks heaped up in a corner and then there might come a telephone call, perhaps at 10 PM, perhaps saying, be here at two o’clock, meaning 2 AM, because that was the time when your olives would be crushed and woe betide anyone who missed out. It was not only bad form but also bad practice to miss your own processing—who knew what the miller, that wily stock trickster from folklore, might be up to without a canny farmer watching him weigh the take. And then—once the olives were crushed to a paste and spread on mats (none too clean, themselves, after a day or two of continuous pressing) and the mats stacked high, the castello was moved into the press, where it would be left for an hour or so as the vegetable water gushed down over the tower and the olive oil leaked out slowly, drop by drop. Often hot water was poured over the tower to encourage the oil to issue forth, which of course raised the temperature of the paste.
Now, even in Tuscany and Umbria, those old-style mills have almost disappeared, replaced by the modern, continuous-cycle machinery that I have come to prefer. Only in a few places, like our Mr. Landi, or Feliciano Fancelli’s delightful old mill in Capodacqua up above Foligno in Umbria, can visitors still see the time-honored process, now considerably cleaned up from what I witnessed years ago. Mr. Landi offers a choice between old-fashioned and modern, but Mr. Fancelli is noteworthy because he is steadfast in his belief that the old-fashioned way is the only way to produce high-quality olive oil. In fact, he opens very early, in mid-October each year, to accommodate Italian singer-songwriter Francesco de Gregori, who insists that the olives from his nearby estate be pressed in the traditional manner and pressed first, before anyone else has access to the mill.
The malaxer or kneading machine is one of the keys to high-quality oil.
It’s great to watch this old way of doing things at Fancelli’s mill, to think about the generations that have preceded us and done the same as in centuries past, following the rhythms, anxiously awaiting the moment when the oil is finally extracted, weighed, calculated—and then the first taste of the new oil, almost hot with the complex and unsubdued flavors of the olives. In the old mills, there was always, tucked away in a corner of the room, a hearth with a low fire burning and a group of old guys sitting around, toasting bruschetta—that rarest of treats, thick slices of rough, country-style bread, toasted on a grid set over the embers, then rubbed with a cut clove of garlic and lavished with the new oil and a sprinkling of salt—a surefire way to convert skeptics to the incredible taste of fresh oil. In a singular bow to modern times, the Fancellis have moved the hearth to a separate room in order not to contaminate the oil with wood ash or the fragrance of a smoky fire. But it’s still an unstinting hand that pours the bright green new oil.
All the time I’m watching this old-fashioned process in utter fascination, however, I’m also thinking about the olives, the olive paste, the crushed mass churning in the open air of the malaxer, and the amount of time it has all been exposed to air, to light, to the warmth of the mill and the friction of the turning stones. Light, heat, atmosphere—these are the enemies of high-quality olive oil. And even though the oil from Fancelli’s mill is extremely high quality, it requires constant vigilance to make it so. After six weeks of producing oil, he needs a long winter vacation.
So my own preference, in this if in nothing else that has to do with food, is to go with the modern process. I like to compare the continuous-cycle process to a bread machine (although believe me, I would never make bread with a machine!): You dump the ingredients in at one end, press a button, and in a matter of minutes, an hour maximum, what issues forth is something utterly delicious.
Clean, cool, and fast, continuous-cycle milling is almost single-handedly responsible for the fact that more good extra-virgin olive oil is available at prices that most people can afford than there has ever been throughout history. Our olives are weighed and rinsed and defoliated within minutes of our arrival at the mill. Then they disappear into the stainless-steel innards of the machine. Here’s what happens inside: The olives are crushed, pits and all, by hammers or steel knives, to the same dun-green paste as in the traditional crusher. Then, as with the traditional process, the paste goes into the malaxer (called the grammola or grammalotrice in Italian, batidora in Spanish, kneader in English), a long double screw that interweaves within the mass and slowly turns the paste for a period of 30 to 40 minutes. This piece of the process is critical to the success of the continuous-cycle machine. The purpose is to pull the molecules of oil together and make the extraction more efficient. But the effect is also to control the bitterness in the final product. More kneading of the paste, I was told by Fadrique Alvarez de Toledo, means a less bitter oil. Fadrique and his father, the Marques de Valdueza, make an elegant Spanish oil called, appropriately, Marques de Valdueza, in the western Spanish region of Extremadura, where the family estates are located. This is how he explained it: “The longer you have the mash in the mixer (batidora), the more velvety the oil; that is, less bitterness, less pungency. Our olives are early picked to get complexity, but we mix longer (but stop before excessive emulsions form, from which the oil cannot be easily extracted) to soften the taste.” So once again, time enters the picture and the producer chooses between extracting more oil with a sweeter flavor profile or less oil but with the pronounced bitterness and pungency many (but by no means all) prefer.
Oil is made in the field, I have heard over and over again; the job of the processor is not to ruin it. Terroir—that wonderful French vineyard concept that wraps up soil structure, climate, weather conditions, and the je ne sais quoi that adds mystery to flavor—terroir is key. Yet in modern oil production, it’s clear that the kneading action of the malaxer plays a critical role. The late Marco Mugelli, a world-renowned Tuscan expert on olive oil production, criticized many California oils for being milled to too fine a paste and left too long in the malaxer. My guess is that the producers in question were trying to make Tuscan-style oil, without understanding the role of both cultivar and terroir in producing that complexity of flavors.
Once the malaxing is done, the paste moves on again to the final stages, the separation of good, fresh oil from the gunk (morchia) and the vegetable water that inevitably accompanies the process, no matter how it is done. And that’s it: The process is done, the circle is complete, and we set our stainless casks, called fusti, under the spout and watch the unctuous green-gold roll into the tin and head for home to celebrate the new oil.
And here’s what we feast on:
Tuscan Bean and Farro Soup for the Olive Harvest
This is the hearty soup we serve for lunch during the olive harvest. If fresh oil isn’t available, use an oil with good, strong flavors, one from Tuscany or Umbria that will stand up to the robust dish; a Picual from Andalusia or a Coratina from Puglia would also be a good choice.
Makes 8 to 10 servings, depending on what else is served
- 1½ cups dried beans, preferably speckled cranberry beans or borlotti, soaked for several hours or overnight
- 1 medium carrot, chopped
- 2 small yellow onions, 1 chopped
- 1 or 2 bay leaves
- 1½ cups farro
- 4 garlic cloves
- ½ cup olive oil
- Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper
- 8 to 10 thin slices dense, grainy Italian country-style bread, preferably at least a day old
- 4 to 6 tablespoons olio nuovo (fresh new olive oil), if available, for serving
- 2 tablespoons finely minced flat-leaf parsley, or more
Drain the beans, and discard the soaking water. Place the beans in a large saucepan with carrot, chopped onions, and bay leaf (or leaves). Cover with fresh water, bring to a boil, lower the heat, and simmer, covered, until the beans are very soft, 40 minutes to 2 hours, depending on the age of the beans. Keep a kettle of water simmering, and add more water to the beans as they absorb the liquid. They should always be just covered with water but never swimming in it.
The farro should not need soaking, but it should be rinsed briefly in a colander to get rid of any dust. In a medium saucepan, cover the rinsed and drained farro with boiling water to a depth of 1 inch. Bring to a simmer and cook, covered, for 20 to 30 minutes, until the farro is tender.
When the beans are very soft, set aside about ½ cup whole beans. Discard the bay leaves and puree the remainder of the beans, with all their liquid and the vegetables that were cooked with them, in a food processor or put through a food mill. Drain the farro and add to the pureed beans. Stir in the reserved whole beans.
Chop the remaining onion with 3 of the garlic cloves until finely minced. Over medium heat, sauté the onion and garlic in ¼ cup of the oil until soft. Add to the pureed beans and mix well. Taste and add salt and plenty of pepper.
Lightly toast the bread slices. Halve the remaining garlic clove, and rub the slices well with the garlic on both sides. When ready to serve, set a toast slice in the bottom of each soup plate and dribble a liberal dose of fresh new oil over each slice. Spoon hot soup over the bread and add another dollop of oil to the top of each serving, without stirring it in. Sprinkle with the parsley and serve immediately, passing more fresh new oil to pour over the top.
1. For more of Mort’s passionate insights into olives and their culture, see his highly entertaining book Olives: The Life and Lore of a Noble Fruit.
2. De Re Rustica, Book V, 8.
3. Higgins, Charles, “Less Watering Improves Olive Oil Quality, Study Finds,” www.oliveoiltimes.com, April 3, 2012.
4. If a candle is lit outside on this day and you cannot see the flame—because the sun is so bright—there will be six more weeks of winter to endure, very close to the myth of the groundhog’s shadow.
5. I say “appeared to be” because the oil in fact had reached its peak, as Baldassari pointed out, back in November. After that, as the olives start to dry on the tree, they give up water. So the percentage of oil per weight of the olives goes up—but the actual quantity of oil remains the same.
6. Castillo de Canena’s Picual took a well-deserved gold medal at the 2011 Fancy Food Show in Washington, D.C., the first Spanish oil ever to be so recognized.
7. Why not harvest at night? Few Palestinians would be foolish enough to venture forth at night. The risk of being shot by Israeli army patrols or assaulted by West Bank settlers is too great.