'Maltempo in Abruzzo' - will the oil get through, as devastating storms wreck the Abruzzo countryside?

We're used to thinking of Italy as an enchanted place of sunshine, outdoor lunches in the shadow of some ancient monument, and sundowners round the pool.

Not this week.    The central Abruzzo region, where the olives for Stroud Green Olive Oil are grown, has been hit by devastating weather.   First blizzards, then floods.   Storms and snow have destroyed 2,700 hectares (that's 10 square miles) of vineyards in the districts of Pescara, Chieti and Teramo.   The city of Pescara is under water.

Just a few days ago, folk were in shirtsleeves, harvesting the trees.  Now the weather is so bad the Abruzzo region has called for a state of emergency.

The mountain people of Abruzzo are used to cold winters - but it's rarely this bad, or so early.  In the Majella region, where Stroud Green Olive Oil comes from, summers are baking hot, spring and autumn are balmy with pleasant days and cool evenings and.   Winter always brings snow to the mountain peaks,but rarely much to the green valleys below 600 metres or to the coastal plain.

When the snow does hit the mountains, roads are closed, cars are fitted with snow tires and chains, the roads are lined with stranded lorries and travel is difficult and hazardous - Abruzzo drivers are used to that.    On the plus side, the ski-ing can be excellent.  Two of central Italy's best ski resorts, Roccaraso and Pescocostanzo, are little more than half an hour away into the mountains from the Aventino olive groves.   It's hard to believe you can ski so far south, far from the garish tourist traps of the Italian alps.

This snowfall has been different.     The severe weather arrived in late November, after a fortnight of almost constant rain - a downpour that nearly (but not quite) put paid to the Stroud Green Olive Oil harvest.   The snow came down in sheets, blanketing the entire region from the peaks of the Gran Sasso as far as the Adriatic beaches.  The picturesque ski resort of Pescocostanzo, just over the mountains, has been transformed into an alpine-style scene weeks before the first skiers usually arrive.

But the weather has had serious implications. Blizzards have blocked roads and flattened ancient vineyards across the region.   One wine grower in Loreto Aprutino estimates he has lost half of his 50-year-old vines, the source of local Trebbiano d'Abruzzo wines.  Hundreds more hectares of the destroyed vineyards are the source of the famous Montepulciano d'Abruzzo wine, so familiar in every London Italian restaurant.

Subsequent snow melt has swollen the rivers and transformed streams into torrents cascading through houses and villages and making travel all b ut impossible.    I generally keep an eye on the Abruzzo weather from London, but I only became aware of how serious it is after seeing photographs of the lake close to Casa della Meridiana almost full to overflowing, and video of the Aventino River just a few hundred metres from the house seemingly on the point of bursting its banks - so much in spate that police closed the road bridge.

Duncan, the driver who will bring the next consignment of Stroud Green Olive Oil back to London next week, told me by phone he had been obliged to stop deliveries in Abruzzo because of the weather - 'You can't drive anywhere - roads swept away, trees down.'

The rain and snow means he has not been able to finish harvesting the olives from his own 500 olive trees, so the olives will be wasted.  On top of all that there was a further small earthquake north of L'Aquila just a couple of days ago which rattled teacups and caused alarm right actross the region.

Fortunately, Duncan expects to pick up the olive oil from the hotel basement where it is stored and bring it back to London N4, so it looks like Stroud Green Olive Oil will get through.   But my heart goes out to the kind people of Abruzzo who have lost their vines, trees, olives and livelihoods because of the weather this year.
 

It's just arrived in Stroud Green.

Words fail me.

Half an hour ago the doorbell rang.  It was Duncan, the van driver, just arrived from Italy with a very special load.   Just 24 hours ago I was still in central Italy, while Duncan was driving across France with a consignment of 13 tins of olive oil in the back.   This evening it arrived.

What an exciting moment.   The first taste!    The past four days in Italy have been so hectic and non-stop we haven't even had an opportunity to taste any of the oil, which came in sealed containers straight onto the truck.  How to describe the experience?

Just amazing.  This oil lives up to expectations.  It's a thick, luminous green the colour of melon juice, and cloudy.  It gives off a powerful aroma of grass, leaves, twigs and olive branches.  Tasting it is like sipping at some kind of slippery, velvety soup, with a slight astringency and marked peppery aftertaste.

It's so completely fresh and utterly unlike anything in a bottle off a supermarket shelf.

This is a great day.   It's the real thing.  No more to add.

Finding the perfect oil mill in Italy - new versus old-style

Picture two very different olive oil mills in the Italian countryside, both producing Italian Extra Virgin Olive Oil.

One looks very old-fashioned:  Two massive stone wheels trundling round and round in a trough, mashing whole fresh olives into a pulp.  You can imagine a mule doing the work (though it's run by electricity now)..

In this mill, the pulp is smeared onto basket-weave discs, which are piled up into a tower and then squeezed from above by a hydraulic press until the juice drips out. Simple.

 

 

Hey presto - Extra Virgin Olive Oil!   This traditional mill is in the comune of Civitella Messer Raimondo, a small hilltop village 160 kilometres east of Rome, on the edge of a mountain range called the Majella, in the Chieti province of Abruzzo.

Take way the electricity and the hydraulic power, and this is essentially the way they've been making olive oil since pre-Roman times. Big stones, heavy weights.

Up the valley to mill number two, ten kilometres away.  Here everything is metallic, new and shiny.  No stones, instead a row of sealed chambers with glass windows where the olives have been macerated for an hour with blades. The mash is pumped into a torpedo-shaped steel centrifuge.

This spins so fast that the oil is forced out of the solid olive waste under enormous pressure .  A further spin to remove superfluous water, and pure Extra Virgin oil is trickling out through a steel pipe.

It's the modern way- every new olive oil mill is built to this design.  This is the Masciontonio mill at Caprafico, Chieti province.

Both methods comply with the legal definition of Extra Virgin Olive Oil - extraction by pure mechanical means, without any heat, chemicals or solvents ('first cold pressing').

So which is better - traditional or new-fangled?    The fresh oil from the two mills looks pretty much the same - green, thick and cloudy.  It may well taste and smell very similar.   Does one method of extraction consistently produce a higher quality of Extra Virgin Oil than the other?  Is traditional superior to new-fangled?  Or is modern the better way?

This is not an easy question - each style has its own proponents.  Yesterday we set out to find out.   Half the olives destined to become Stroud Green Olive Oil have gone to one type of mill, and half to the other.

Our own freshly-picked fruit, from the half acre of olive trees below Casa della Meridiana, has been sent to two modern centrifuge mills.  We'll be collecting the last of the pressed oil tomorrow, and we're expecting a yield of around 45 litres.

However to fulfil demand, we've sourced a further 50 litres of pure, just-pressed oil made by our next door neighbour, who swears by the traditional mill.  It's also excellent oil - and we've tasted it.  So will anyone be able to detect any difference in the way the two were milled?

They both look great so far.  Perhaps we'll be able to make a judgement at the olive oil tasting in Stroud Green next week.  Watch this space.

The Stroud Green Olive Oil harvest - day one

We've started picking - the dawn of a day with blue sky and no rain meant we were able to get the Stroud Green Olive Oil harvest under way at Casa della Meridiana yesterday.  Hooray!  

In the course of about five hours, we harvested five trees and picked 120 kilos of beautiful, luscious green and black olives, before another rainstorm stopped play.    We tok the freshly-harvested fruit straight to an olive mill up the valley, for processing.  Here's my step-by-step guide to a special Extra Virgin day in pictures:

1.  The team:  Ben, Peter, Mike and Bobbie, plus tools of the trade -  ladder, secateurs and shears, saws, hand-held olive rakes, and old clothes.

2. The net and hand rake.  Spread the enormous nylon net around each tree, then rake off the green and black olives into it.   Very, very satisfying and compulsive.   Cutting down high branches to bring down the fruit is smart, since the tree has to be drastically pruned anyway. 

3. High-level picking.  Don't tell Health and Safety.

4.  Ground crew.    Now you pour the olives from the net into special crates, which let in air so the olives won't spoil.   Yesterday's harvest yielded seven crates.

5.  Scheduled break.  Not tea.

6.  At t'mill.  This frantoio (olive mill) is run by a co-operative in the nearby village of Piana La Roma.   It has a very modern centrifuge press.   We'll gradually try out all the local mills to find the best quality and cleanest.

7.  Weighed i.  This is Ben with 120 kilos of newly picked olives, behind him some of the scores of crateloads of olives similarly waiting to be pressed. We'll pick up the oil tomorrow or the day after.

8.  Ready for pressing.  Here they measures olives in quintali - a quintale is 100kilos - and our labours today yielded 1.2 quintali in the local jargon.  This is a good crop.  

It looks like we'll harvest nearly 3 quintali this year, about 30 litres or more of good 'Stroud Green Special Reserve' extra virgin oil from our own trees.  We have seven olive trees to go, so we'll finish the job as soon as the weather dries up again.

But now we've got some hard decisions to make.  

It's Saturday - and it's raining again.  By mid day, we'll have to decide whether to go with what we've got, and have the first half pressed, or wait for better weather forecast for tomorrow and try to harvest the rest.  There's always the risk of the olives spoiling.   No wonder farmers are always watching the weather.

Stroud Green's olives are still a little moist

Here are the olives that will produce Stroud Green Olive Oil Special Reserve - the olives grown on our own small plantation - as they were today, looking a little damp.  Soaked, in fact.  We're waiting for dry weather, hoping to start the picking in the next couple of days.

It's unpleasant picking in the rain, and the mud gets in.    So that's a no-no.   For today it's a question of stiff upper lip, a drop of red wine, and waiting for the weather to improve.  The forecast is for better weather in the next couple of days.   

Watch this space.

The countdown begins....damply.

The countdown to Stroud Green Olive Oil Harvest Day has begun.

At break of dawn this morning, the advance guard of your crack olive-picking team left Stroud Green and headed for the olive fields of eastern Italy.  We're on our way to Abruzzo.   As soon as we get out of the airport at Pescara, gateway to the little-known mountainous region, this is what we see:

Serried ranks of cloudy, new season 'novello' olive oil!

In Britain, your local Asda might feature baked beans. In Italy, the pile-em-high show-stopper in the Auchun hypermarket is extra virgin olive oil so fresh you could mistake it for pea soup, just made from some of the zillions of olive trees that blanket the hillsides. It's all ultra-local produce, and it's the real thing. This augurs well.

Just one more observation for now: it's wet.  Very wet.  Wetter than a whale's whatsit.   Wetter, probably, than I've ever seen it;  the drive through absolutely drenching curtains of rain along flooded roads into the mountains today has not been the easiest (translation: one of the most perilous and trying journeys ever).)   This does not bode well for the olive harvest:  we need two dry days before Monday to achieve it.

We are hoping that O-Day (Olive-Picking Day No 1) will be Friday, so we can get it to the mill in time.   It could be a cliffhanger.  Watch this space.

How to identify healthy supermarket Extra Virgin Olive Oil

There's a brand of extra virgin oil sold at a market near here in London N4 which advertises itself thus: "Brimming with goodness and healthy for your heart. Packed full of vitamins and antioxidants to give you a lift."

Wow - doesn't that make you feel like gulping down a thimbleful?  Like Irn-Bru with a health certificate.  But is it entirely accurate? Hmmm........

Yes, Extra Virgin Oil is good for you.   And this approach certainly presses all the right buttons for today's lifestyle-aware city-dweller: a stress-busting substance, that will give you more energy while at the same time protecting you against the consequences of overwork.  And natural to boot.  One gulp, and you'll be climbing Everest.

But there's a bit more to it than that.  Good quality Extra Virgin Olive Oil may be a superfood (and the brand I refer to is undoubtedly the genuine stuff and a very good, healthy product).  But not all olive oil - not even all 'extra virgin oil' - is the same, and with the world so full of snake-oil salesmen, it helps to know what to look out for.

One of the most interesting discoveries I've made lately is that there is medical science behind the assertion that if it tastes bitter, it's doing you good.   Really healthy Extra Virgin Olive Oil should have that astringent aftertaste.

So here is my quick five point guide to buying the best health-giving olive oil to put on your food, as opposed to a substance you might use to lubricate the car's crankshaft.   Always read the label - but pay attention to the taste as well.

           * The oil must be Extra Virgin, not plain old Olive Oil or (perish the idea) Olive Pomace Oil

           * It should be as fresh as possible, with a grassy aroma and a pronounced peppery afterburn.

           * It doesn't matter too much about the colour.

           * Oil labelled as 'light' isn't any healthier than ordinary - in fact it may be worse

           * It has to be the real thing and not illicitly blended, refined, chemically treated, contaminated or adulterated - and that's the hard bit.  Do you really know where it came from?

I am not a nutritionist, dietician or doctor.  But I'm ready to accept that real Extra Virgin Olive Oil has health-giving qualities.  This is not the place for a science lesson - you'll need an advanced degree in Wikipedia Studies for that - but many nutritionists now seem to agree that the high proportions of organic compounds and substances such as polyphenols, hydrocarbons, vitamins, oleocanthol, oleic acid and monounsaturated fat in Extra Virgin Oil have positive health benefits.

Oleocanthol, for example, is a powerful anti-inflammatory.   Polyphenols are potent anti-oxidants (good for breaking down 'free radicals' and preventing some cancers..  Oleic acid bolsters the immune system.  Mono-unsaturated fat appears to promote 'good' cholesterol and cardiovascular health.

Few of these volatile organic compounds, though, survive the refining, chemical assault or heat treatment used in the creation of cheaper, non-Extra Virgin olive oils, or when Extra Virgin Oil is commercially blended with low-grade oil.

What's more, some of these natural compounds appear to be responsible for the unique taste and smell of Extra Virgin oil - a complex combination of pungency, astringency and bitterness with velvety texture so obvious to anyone who cares to sample a teaspoonful of real, fresh Extra Virgin Olive Oil.

It's a peppery afterburn, not unpleasant, which sometimes makes you cough.   No afterburn, no health benefit, is one possible conclusion.

So forget the blandishments of the marketing men - the surest way to know if an olive oil is doing you good is to taste it.  Give it a gulp.  The more peppery the taste, the healthier it is likely to be.   You may not do stupid things faster and with more energy - but you might live a longer and happier life.