The Olive Mill

Despite being in her middle eighties Erminia still has the enthusiasm of an excitable child when it comes to the olive harvest. “Have you got your oil yet?” she asked me yesterday morning. “No they told me to come back this evening” I replied.

It was dark by the time I got to the Mill. It’s a small family affair and at this time of the year they are working flat out and everyone looked tired. There were vehicles of all shapes and sizes parked in the Mill compound and an impatient knot of locals waiting to get their olives weighed. Having already delivered our olives I walked through the throng and into the Mill where you are immediately hit by the powerful odour of fresh olive oil. Inside there are rows of fifty litre stainless steel containers that look like milk churns, each with the owner’s name on it in felt tip or stencil. I could see our two churns had already been filled and weighed so I went to the little office to pay before putting our churns onto a trolley and taking them to the car.

There are several olive mills within a few kilometres of our house, but we always use the same one in Locorotondo that Erminia first recommended to us. I think she rather fancies the middle-aged mill owner Donato, because she always has a schoolgirl smile on her face when she talks about him and how clean and tidy he keeps the Mill.

Back home I lug the two heavy churns to our Cantina and unscrew the lids to look at the fresh green and cloudy oil inside. It looks and smells like green vegetable juice. It will be a few weeks before the sediment settles out and it looks more like the stuff you can buy in the supermarket. Staring down into the churns I feel the satisfaction of knowing that we now have at least a year’s supply of our own fresh oil from our own trees. A kind of satisfaction that I never new existed before we set sail from London eight years ago.

This morning Erminia asked me again if I had got our oil. “Yes” I said, “forty eight kilos, so we got a yield of twelve percent, not bad.” “Bravo Docco” Erminia said, nodding appreciatively, although also, I suspect, a little irked that we had done better than her son Georgio, who only got ten.