Net gain. Best harvest in years!

We’re now two days into the Casa della Meridian olive harvest and there's lots of excellent news. It’s the best harvest in years. After three bad seasons, the olives are plentiful and the oil will be of excellent quality - and lots of it. Masciantonio’s award-winning oil mill at Caprafico is booked for Thursday. And the weather is better than expected. But progress is slow - this is hard work!



So far we’ve stripped and pruned three trees. There are eight to go. We’ve filled eight crates with fruit and stacked them under the portico. That’s around 160kg. But we calculate that the final harvest will be about 450kg of olives (in Italian olive-speak that’s four and a half quintali - a quintale is 100kg). And we have until Thursday to get them off the trees and into boxes.

Harvesting started well, but slowly. On Sunday morning, with clear skies and fine weather, Bobbie and I started on the first tree. This is a monster that overhangs the entrance steps and is laden with fruit, but is very difficult to harvest. Our olive-stripping skills are rusty. I’ll post a video tomorrow to demonstrate. We laid down a net, and used little hand-rakes to strip low-hanging fruit from the bottom branches. Thousands of black olives cascaded into the net.





By coffee-time we realised we were only going to finish one tree in the day. This first tree is on sloping ground, very tall, split into four and hard to climb. We got the ladder out and began on the upper branches. The ladder was a death trap. Eventually we realised we'd save time by simply chopping the top branches down and stripping them on the ground. It was actually hot. By three o’clock I was shirtless. ‘Aren’t you cold’ asked a passing farmer. No.



By dark, we’d finished the tree, filled four crates and got them under shelter. We had tea. The rain started about six o’clock. When we began the long drive to pick up the rest of the olive-picking team from Chieti Scalo, it was just a drizzle. It got worse. We ended up driving for the next hour in torrential rain and sheet lightning, along flooded and unlit roads, with blind bends, hairpins and no road markings. And then we got lost in Chieti in the dark.



This was not the easiest of trips.  The day ended brilliantly though. With no food in the house (shops all closed on Sunday) and no time to cook anyway, we headed straight for a restaurant - Trattoria del Lago on the edge of Lake Casoli.

This was a good decision: it turned out to be brilliant. A very classy first course of a platter of meat and cheese with toothsome little pickles and jams, followed by excellent meat and fish, and lashings of local red and white wine. Fully restored and adequately refuelled now - ready to get back to work. We’ll sleep well.

Tomorrow: we pick, prune, visit the olive mill, and go to a bar. And we end up dining on Shelley’s magnificent veal involtino in front of the blazing hearth.