Olive Oil Crisis in Izzalini: a neighbor lets us down

Of all the harvests that take place during the year, there are two which require careful timing and the full cooperation of everyone involved: (1) the picking and fast processing of wine grapes before the whole crop is spoiled and (2) the olive harvest, for exactly the same reason.

Well, our 2008 olive raccolta became complicated at the end of last week because the third member of our informal neighborhood cooperative became uncooperative. This guy rang us from his apartment in Rome to say he'd decided not to come up over the weekend, the time slot scheduled for the harvest of his grove in Izzalini. His excuse was that it was raining in Rome so maybe it would also rain in Todi and he'd prefer to pick the olives on November 29 and 30. Uh-huh.

This carpetbagger -- I'll call him Buffone -- knew full well that Amedeo and I had already picked our olives and were waiting for his to meet the required minimum weight for a private pressing -- about 250 kg. We had carefully placed the olives in special containers and stored them in cool semi-darkness, but there is a limit to how long you can leave them before they mold or rot. By postponing our harvest of his grove, Buffone was exceeding that limit by a full week. You bet we were mad.

Amedeo, Antonietta and I had an emergency meeting to consider our options. The first would be to take our crates of olives to the mill and leave them to be mixed with small quantities brought in by others. This horrified my friends, who are definitely purists when it comes to the quality of olive oil. They're convinced that our lovingly-sorted fruit would be tossed into the mill with wormy, moldy, dried up and rotting olives from careless or evil-doing homeowners. No way would they accept just any old oil in return for the weight we delivered. It was essential to have a private pressing.

The second option would be to purchase raw olives from another source. This plan was adopted and Amedeo spent the entire weekend searching for healthy olives. On Sunday afternoon he located an acceptable grove in the next province over and made a deal to buy the extra kilograms we needed.

However, there wasn't enough time to keep our first appointment at the mill yesterday morning. We rescheduled and will now press on Friday. Fortunately the weather is cool and we're hoping the four days we've lost won't affect our stored harvest. We're thinking good thoughts and not even turning on a light to peek at the crates, let alone touch the precious olives.