November: Olive picking!

As we say in Italy: after April it comes May. September is long gone, the grapes have been harvested and our wine is secured in the vats. It is now time to pick the olives! It's November and in Tuscany you can tell it just driving around the countryside: hundreds of improvised workers populate the hills around Florence. For about two weeks whoever owns as much as a "tongue of land" with olive trees on it is engrossed in the ceremony of the olive picking. The fields' workforce quadruples. Accountants put on their gloves, surgeons take theirs off and pull on some boots, lawyers march with ladders over shoulders and farmers look at all of them and shake their heads... My family, of course, is part of the show. My parents bought an old barn in the late sixties with one hundred olive trees attached to the property. Today the barn is a house and the trees still produce excellent olive oil. It’s my mom’s job every year to check the tools. First the nets to recuperate the olives that fall from the trees. One of them is new, the other is old and ripped; it is probably the same one that my grandparents bought to replace the World War Two parachute that they used to use. It is going to be o.k. for this one last time, next year she will buy a new one… Ore will she? Next are the “manine”, little plastic combs in the shape of hands. Everyone should carry one: they run through the branches leaving the leaves, tacking the olives off. We also need two ladders and some gloves. In different parts of Italy, more recently, it is current the use of motorized sticks that slap the trees and make the olives falling down in to the net. We don’t use them. This system is valid for bigger plants and flat terrains. We live on top of a hill and our trees are only twenty five years old because of the great freeze of 1985 when all of them died for the intense cold. I also believe that there is something deeply wrong in the beating of an olive tree.

We are now ready to start. It’s nine o’clock on a freezing Sunday morning. The morning frost is evaporated but it’s still cold. Luckily today the wind is giving us a break. We start with the further trees and we want to finish a row by lunch. I place the net and my brother helps with the “pioli”, little wooden sticks that we use to secure the net. My dad has already started with the bottom branches, my mom take care of the other side. My wife has disappeared on top of the tree and I climb the ladder to reach the top part. After about twenty minutes all the olives are picked and on the net ready to be collected and place in the crate. It was not a big tree but produced about half of a crate or 20 lbs of olives. It will give us 2 lbs of olive oil if this year will be productive and the percentage will be around 10%. By lunch time it’s wormer and we all toke off our jackets and heats. It’s time for a quick snack: bread, prosciutto, pecorino cheese, a glass of wine and we are ready to go again. By five o’clock it’s dark and you are not able to see the olives anymore. We collect our tools and we put every in the storage room. Last thing to do is to collect the crates and pile them under the “loggia”. They need to have air in order not to mold.

The morning after I am off work so I can help my parents who both toke the week off. It takes us about two weeks to complete the job and if it doesn’t rain too much and we can pick almost all the olives we can get up to10,000 lbs! When all the olives are in the crates it’s time to bring them to the “frantoio”, the oil mill. My mom has booked for us a spot in the morning so we load all our cars with the precious goods, they will smell like it for weeks, and we slowly move toward the destination. As we get there we encounter many tractors and trucks coming from the mill full of freshly pressed olive oil. They work for big farmhouses and usually press their olives during the night.

It's our turn! we unload the containers in a giant whole where they are sucked up, washed and send in the first machine. Two big stone wheels crush them leaving a brownish thick paste. The paste goes through many processes and is always kept cool, which is very important to not alter the flavor of the oil. After about one hour the first drops of golden-green liquid are coming out. It's more a fluid, really. It's very dense full of sediments and has to rest for at least a week in order to be used. It smells delicious, tough, and the first thing we do when we get home is to try it on some sliced grill bread. It's still very spicy and strong. It's so good and we are very proud of it!

Michele Baldacci. 11/24/2010.