And this how it looks when the first gush flows out of the olive mill. [Picture from www.lucciola.me] Doesn't it just get the juices flowing? Now we're counting down the days until we start picking our own!
We know the harvest is under way because the first Facebook messages started arriving this morning, bearing images like the one above, of the magical green liquid just off the trees. This one was posted by my Abruzzo friend Sammy.
The new oil is, she observed, 'Soooooo good
you almost wanted to dive into it.' It may look radioactive, but it
really is that green when it's top quality oil freshly pressed and from an ancient olive grove in a DOP area - nothing added and nothing taken away.
Olive plants are wondrous trees. They fruit late in the year. In mountainous
Abruzzo, where our oil comes from, very late indeed - the picking
usually starts at the end of October and can go on into late November or
even early December. Most of the olive trees in Abruzzo grow high up, sometimes well above 600m, where the fruit is late to mature and ripen. We'll
pick ours in mid-November..
Sadly, we don't live in Italy all year round but every autumn we recognise the more traditional signs that the olive-picking season has begun. The little three-wheeler trucks called apes parked in the lane loaded with empty crates. The shouts and calls from under the trees. People gathered in small family groups with boxes and packed lunches, laying out nets. Somebody glimpsed balanced up a ladder.
So another olive oil harvest - la raccolta - has begun, the latest in a tradition going back four thousand years. Hooray! In this blog, I'll take my readers through the final few weeks of our own Abruzzo olive oil's progress from tree to olive mill and fustino (steel barrel), and its journey onward from the mountains of east central Italy to London. Can't wait to get started.
Do join me in our Extra Virgin season! And please leave a comment - I want to read your thoughts.
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