olive you too

you wanted an update!? an update you shall have!

the olives are here! the olives are here! and so many of them....
Sunday morning dawned lovely and cold as a welldigger's bottom, as my mom is fond of saying. Snow was predicted for this week (and has in fact arrived in the foothills), and so we took advantage of the Sunday sun to help Zia Gabby, Manuel's aunt, with her 200 olive plants. She is a widow and does the 200 plants every year by herself, with the help of her daughters who come in on the weekends. For perspective's sake: on Sunday, 10 people finished about 5 plants, working from 8 to 5 with a long Italian lunch. You can imagine how slow going it is for one person.

The ground under each tree has to be well-covered with the telo, or net, because the olives are picked, or rather raked, off the tree and thrown onto the ground. This is done by hand and also with tiny rake-like tools (I prefer the hand method). The bottom of the tree is the easy part; the top of the tree is the hard (but more fun!) part. A ladder is required, or a monkey-like ability (and desire) to shimmy up said tree.

Here is my book report, "What I Learned While Picking Olives." I was out there with Manuel, his mom, his aunt, his cousins, and his brand-new second cousin, baby Matilda. Manuel used to work at a frantoio (where they press olives), and his mom and aunt have 100 years of olive-picking between them, so they were able to answer all my questions without breaking a sweat. It was one of the easiest interviews I have ever conducted...the sun was bright, the sky was blue, the leaves were silver and green, the smell of the lunchtime sausages (cooked over olive branches) was wafting through the air...Oskar the dog was barking...people were laughing...the thought that passed through my head was this: since getting an iPod, I often put in my headphones and tune out the world while I am cooking or cleaning or whatever....it occurred to me that, while olive-picking is the kind of zone-out-activity for which an iPod would be useful, I would not for a million euro have put on my headphones...there was way too much sensory beauty going on.

And here is the story of olives:
In a good season, each tree yields about 25 kilograms of olives. A quintale, or 100 kgs, will usually make about 15-20 litres (4-5 gallons) of oil. SO 200 trees would make about 700-750 litres of oil.....that is a lot of oil. Of course, Italians use a lot of oil (not that much though).

The frantoio or mulino is where the oil is made. Each family hauls their harvest off to the mulino, and by appointment the olives are pressed. Olive-pressing usually goes 24 hours a day in this season. It used to be only cold stone pressed (as you see on expensive bottles of oil in the States), but now they also do a rapid hot-press method, which seemed to be shunned by the Italians with whom I was picking. Changes the taste, apparently.

And oh, the taste. There is almost nothing as good as REAL first press olive oil. The problem is that it is almost impossible to find in the States. I am bringing some home (pressed from the very olives I picked!) so if you come visit me in Dallas I'll let you taste it. :) Its color has to be seen to be believed...a thick, opaque Van Gogh sort of green.

Pictures accompany this report; please forward all questions to the author. :)

vanessa