Erminia offered to give us some instruction on the picking of olives, but we thought the best thing was to turn out one morning and give Erminia and Paolo a hand with their trees. Erminia’s face lit up when we arrived in our wellies and old clothes and we learned an incredible amount that day. Harvesting styles vary throughout the Med but basically fall into three categories – sticking nets under all your trees and waiting for the olives to drop (easy, but doesn’t produce especially good oil as many of the olives are old and rotten by the time they are collected) – beating the crap out of your trees with big sticks (produces fresher olives, but doesn’t do the trees a lot of good and is probably very satisfying if you hate olive trees) – picking by hand (produces the best olives but is f***ing hard work). Commercially, olives are also harvested by using tractor mounted shaking machines, which clamp onto the trunk and vibrate the whole tree, perfect is you have a few thousand euros to spare, although there are smaller versions which just shake individual branches and cost a couple of thousand euros. The region of Puglia alone produces half of Italy’s olive oil and about 5% of the world’s oil and most of this I guess will actually have been harvested by shaking machines.
Anyway, with Erminia and Paolo we experienced the local peasant farmer method of harvesting, which is basically picking by hand (aka f***ing hard work). Generally you lay a couple of large rectangular nets under a single tree to cover the whole area beneath the tree. Then one or two people ascend ladders to pick the fruit and carry out any major pruning. Final pruning is carried out in March or April, but I guess the theory is that if there are any big branches to be pruned you do them at harvest time to save effort. Meanwhile one or two people on the ground pick the lower branches and beat the crap out of any pruned branches that fall from above. The olives are picked by running your hand along each branch and pinging the fruit off onto the ground. Occasionally less accessible branches are beaten with a stick or a pruning saw, but this kind of feels like cheating. When the tree is clear of fruit the nets are gathered and the fruit tipped from them into big plastic bins. Back at the house the olives are then cleaned by tipping them into a sieve about the size of kitchen drawer (actually Erminia and Paolo’s appears to be an adapted kitchen drawer) and shaking them to remove dirt while at the same time picking out dead leaves, twigs, stones and mud.
While waiting for our friends to arrive we set about buying equipment, basically four stout nets, two wooden fruit tree ladders and a bunch of plastic bins. We also started to pick some of our smaller trees to give an impression of progress. When our friends Ann, Mats, Bill and Linda arrived we set about picking in earnest. Our target was to harvest around 250 kg of olives for our appointment with the Olive Mill (“Frantoio” in Italian). Local Mills process olives in 230-270 kg batches, so 250 kg is a good batch load.
Next morning old Paolo stumped round on his walking stick to inspect our crop and decided to add confusion as is sometimes his way. We had already begun to load the olives into sacks when Paolo insisted we put them back into the bins to check the quantity. We had not been filling the bins quite high enough and Paolo was doubtful whether we had the minimum 230 kg. Anyway we reloaded the olives into sacks and onto the back of Paolo’s old Ape three-wheeler, along with a big stainless steel “Bidone” (the container for the oil which looks like a milk churn). Young Paolo, old Paolo’s grandson and our builder, drove the load to the Mill, while we followed in two hire cars like expectant parents.
I think I’ve mentioned that virtually all our neighbours have the surname “Convertini”, as did the man who came to inspect our gas boiler and sundry other trades people. Unsurprisingly, the Mill on the outskirts of Locorotondo where Erminia had made our appointment was owned by Senor Donato … Convertini. Running an Olive Mill must be good for your peace of mind because Donato is a gentle, unruffled man, whose presence is a calming influence on everyone. Foreigners harvesting their olives is still a rare event down here and Mr Convertini kindly allowed us to wander round the Mill taking photos while he explained the process. The Mill itself is spotless and as you approach it there is the all pervading perfumed smell of freshly milled olives. Our sacks were emptied into a very large plastic crate, then weighed and labelled. Old Paolo was right our load came in at 229 kg. At this stage Mr Convertini asked us if we were registered growers. “Er … no.” It turns out that had we registered we would receive a State subsidy of about €30 per load, which would more than cover the €25 fee for processing. We put the load down under Erminia’s name, so she will get the subsidy. When it is paid I’m sure she will want to give us our share, but we’d be happy for her to keep it for all the help she has given us.
Many people brings their loads on spec without making a booking and there are crates and crates stacked everywhere awaiting processing. Because we have booked, our crate is taken straight for processing. Firstly, the olives are macerated then tipped into the mill – a great vat which has three millstones, like fat coins balanced on their edges, which revolve around the vat and crush the olives and any remaining leaves, twigs and mud into a green pulp. Secondly, the pulp is spread about two centimetres thick onto steel discs about 70cm in diameter. The discs are stacked into a pressing machine to a height of about two metres, where they are placed under massive hydraulic pressure for an hour or two, until the stack is no more than a few centimetres deep. During this process you can see the oil dribbling from the stack like the grease from a donner kebab spit. There are four of these machines, each labelled with the name of the owner of the load. Finally, the raw oil is passed through a separator to remove any water and then dribbles into the Bidone. Each Bidone has the name of the owner written on it. In our case it was sufficient for us to write “l’Inglesi” on the side – “the English”.
Mr Convertini told us to return for our oil in about four hours, so we went for a leisurely lunch in Locorotondo. On our return our Bidone was waiting and was then carried to the scales for weighing. It came to 30 kg, about 33 litres, a yield of about 13%. Oil yields can be up to about 20%, but this year the olive crop is abundant, but the water content is high. Inevitably, we unscrewed the lid of the Bidone to take a look at our product, later at the house we drew off a jarful to have a good sniff and a taste. Young, home produced olive oil looks very little like the clear, fairly sterile stuff you buy in the supermarket. It is a deep cloudy green with a pungent smell and a peppery aftertaste. It tastes delicious.
After we said “goodbye” to our friends we began to take stock. Our first load was the product of just fourteen trees out of sixty, admittedly some quite big ones. On this basis we had the capacity for another two or three loads – mainly on our own. We decided to do at least two more. What we had envisaged as a short, sharp week or two of hard work was actually a slog of five weeks or so. Most mornings we descended into the field while the building work continued, dragging nets and ladders. Sometimes Claude, Jane and Lucky came over to lend a hand. By the time we finished our third load we were knackered and seeing olives in our sleep. Because it was a bumper harvest for everyone appointments at the Mill became harder and harder to book and by our third visit Mr Convertini and his staff looked exhausted too, with olive crates stacked everywhere and in sacks and bins in odd corners.
We decided to do a final load because it didn’t seem right to leave any of the trees unharvested and in some ways this last load turned out to be the most rewarding. While we had been harvesting our olives Erminia and Paolo had been working on theirs. In the time we took to collect three loads they had managed eight, admittedly with a little help from the family and from time to time the small shaking machine owned by their son Georgio. As well as collecting their olives Erminia was also engaged in the mass production of cheese. At five thirty every morning for two or three weeks old Paolo drove down to the local Masseria (basically a large farm) to collect 75 litres of milk, which Erminia processed into five big cheeses each day, plus countless pots of Ricotta, cooking the cheese in a great cauldron over an open fire in her kitchen. Most mornings she would bring us a container of Ricotta (basically a bye product of the cheese-making), plus sometimes a bowl of warm curds and whey to be eaten with fresh bread – great if you like the taste (me, sort of) and vomit-making if you don’t (Sue definitely).
