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.

Beautiful, healthy, delicious frost-nudged purple olives

We're about 2/3 through the raccolta (harvest) of olives in our area and I was one of the lucky ones who finished before today's wild storm came and knocked millions of olives off the un-picked trees. Actually, we barely made it; we finished the last tree at 5:00 yesterday afternoon, just before dark. My little harvest is safely awaiting the mill in ventilated plastic crates, stacked up in the middle of the garage. It's far more important to give the olives breathing space than to protect the car from hailstones.

I had wonderful help this year. Two of my friends/neighbors in our informal cooperative olive pressing were joined by their relatives: Amedeo brought his cousin, Franco, and Amedeo's wife, Antonietta, recruited her brother, Tiberio. The whole family is my family and I only wish I had more skills to do for them the hundred things they do for me.

Saturday or Sunday morning we'll harvest an olive grove on the lower (valley side) acres of Izzalini. The property belongs to a Roman who can't come up during the week, but shares in our cooperative effort. I sure hope this storm hasn't reduced us to scouring the ground for recently-dropped, but usable, olives. That is not fun to do.

Post-Election Reality: The Olive Harvest Is About To Begin

Well, it’s time to get my head out of the clouds and put my Nikes back on our stony Izzalini soil. The olive trees await us and as soon as we have a cold snap followed by dry weather we’ll be out there with our ground nets and our ladders.
2007 was one of our periodic "bad years” and we didn’t even bother to think about the harvest. Almost no one in our area had enough fruit to pick.
My particular trees were infested with fruit fly larva in 2007. The previous winter was particularly warm and the flies, not the trees, were fruitful and multiplied. I could have milled those olives and produced “olio grasso” (fatty oil), as the farmers in Southern Italy normally do, but I don’t care for the taste. It’s heavy, not at all peppery, and the addition of worm protein turns the oil rancid in no time at all.
The groves of some of my neighbors produced olives last year, but all the fruit shriveled up and dropped because we had no rain during the summer. We could have picked them up off the ground, but then what? They contained almost no raw oil.
The Umbrian zone to the west and south of Todi had a pretty good crop in 2007 and they immediately profited by raising the price of local oil by about 50%. Those of us with our own, normally productive trees refused to pay nine Euros (US $13.50) per liter and instead rationed our 2006 supply. Thrift and pride in equal measures.
La Casella’s trees aren’t exactly full of olives this fall, but there are more than enough to harvest and mill. I’ll report back on how it goes.