Luis's olive grove
This year I visited Luis on his olive grove (and house) in southern Spain. We'd exchanged a few emails, and he offered to pick me up from Jerez and show me around his grove. He got me from the bus station, and after apologising for his poor English - which was actually brilliant, thanks to his years working for General Motors in his past life - he turned to me and asked "So I've been wanting to know this - how did you find me?".
The internet, was of course the answer. In truth, I'd come to Jerez for sherry. Sherry vinegar, to be exact. It's an incredible product that I'd love Saint Rosalia to sell in the near future - I'm just trying to figure out a way to make the numbers work. Olive oil is never far from my mind, so I'd searched 'olive oil producers' on Google Maps in the area to see if there was anything I could visit, two birds with one stone. Luis's olive grove popped up. "A small private olive oil producer with a passion for his hobby", read the first review.
His grove is about a 25 minute drive from Jerez, in the province of Cadiz. This isn't the heart of Spain's olive oil country. That's further east, where you'll find the industrial "sea of olives" in the area around Jaen. Here production is generally on a smaller scale. Here it's green, hilly and windy. So windy that we drive past several wind turbines, which Luis bemoans. A battle with the turbines company to get them to turn the turbines lights off at night was successful.
I ask if the high winds are problematic to keeping healthy olive trees. "Not really", Luis replies. "The trees are tough". Luis is a matter of fact man, and an honest one. Like most small groves, Luis uses the local mill to press his olives - turning them into olive oil. He tells me about a serious incident he had with the mill a few years ago, where he believed they'd pressed someone else's olives and told him the oil was from his olives. He was able to test his last years harvest against this new oil, and it proved it was completely different oil.
This highlights how rampant olive oil fraud is. Transparency and trust is important, and for him to tell me this - I instantly trusted him. He was an awful salesman.
When Luis bought the 4 hectare plot in 1994 there was nothing there. He planted olive trees the following year and has been making organic Picual olive oil for the last 20 years. Why did he chose to plant the Picual variety, as opposed to the popular Arbequina? "Our family roots are in Jaen, where Picual olive trees are everywhere. I think it tastes good too, no?".
We're stood on the terrace of his house, designed by his architect brother-in-law. He tells me if he can make 3000 litres this harvest, it will be a good year. The weathers been good this year, by which he means stable. Flooding and draught has strangled his trees in previous years, reducing his harvest by up to 30%. Not to mention the fruit flies, which eat holes in the olives, rendering them rancid and useless. He's proud of his organic status, but the fruit flies are a bugger. Recently he installed a little yellow bucket to hang from the middle of every other tree, with fly poison in it. It seems to have done the trick, Luis's olives look very healthy this year.
The harvest is just a few weeks away. How does he know when's the right time to pick the olives? "You see here, when the olive turns from a dull green to a sort of shiny yellow, this is the perfect time to harvest. The polyphenol content is the maximum."
Once the olives are bashed off the tree and captured by the nets splayed across the ground, they're tipped into baskets and driven to the mill that same day. Speed is important. The olive will begin to spoil as soon as it's shaken from its branch. Once the olives arrive at the local mill, you have the option to clean them before pressing. "I don't clean, because then you have water on the olives, this goes into the oil and it is less good quality", says Luis.
On the journey back to Jerez, we pass several bigger olive farms. "How can I compete!", he exclaims. We pull over and Luis tells me, "The way these guys farm now is not sustainable." The density of olive trees was probably triple that of Luis's grove. "The trees, when they're so close together, don't have enough water or nutrients to live very long. They will replace these trees every 20 years and start again". Rows of tightly packed uniform trees make it easier for modern machinery to harvest, and you can squeeze more yield from the land, but the environmental impact is bleak, "All these farms using irrigation. We don't have enough water in south of Spain for this. Olive trees don't need a lot of water, they are tough, but when they're planted so close it's not natural. It's cheaper like this, but I'm so sure that I can taste the difference in my oil."