The harvest!
I’m here to bring you a silver lining to the absolute shit-show that's been 2020.
That silver lining is the annual olive harvest in the Iblea mountains, Sicily. Early signs are looking promising for a very fruitful harvest! The climate has been kind and those rascal fruit-flies have largely been keeping to themselves this summer!
Here’s a brief story of our harvest...
That silver lining is the annual olive harvest in the Iblea mountains, Sicily. Early signs are looking promising for a very fruitful harvest! The climate has been kind and those rascal fruit-flies have largely been keeping to themselves this summer!
Here’s a brief story of our harvest...
Pietro and Salvatore started the harvest at the end of September this year. This is much earlier than most of their oil producing neighbours in the region, who usually harvest from November through to January.
They’re quick to inform me that the decision to harvest in autumn rather than winter isn’t driven by their aversion of the cold, but because it produces better oil. The olives are still young and green in September/October. Although this yields less oil because the olives are less juicy, the flavour is more intense and contains a higher percentage of polyphenols (antioxidants).
The olive oil harvest is just once a year and takes up to thirty days of non-stop, intense work, with each olive being picked and graded by hand. The guys draft in the help of their extended family and friends. These men and women may be financially rewarded for their hard work or kept well lubricated with premium oil for the rest of the year.
It’s quite old skool to still harvest by hand these days. Larger farms use huge overhead cranes I’ll refer to as “tree-shakers” to dislodge the olives. While this is more efficient and cheaper, it also damages the trees, many of which are hundreds of years old, and the olives themselves. P and S use the more delicate manual scrapers, not unlike your household back scratcher. Each olive is picked and graded by hand. This is important because we only want unbruised green olives to go into the premium blend. Over-ripe (purple) olives don’t get thrown away, they just go into the cheaper oil blends.
Within 12 hours of being picked, the olives become oil, through the natural process of cold pressing. Olive oil is essentially fruit juice. Nothing else is added. For our oil, the guys blend 100% Tonda Iblea olives, the olive varietal unique to this region and prized for it’s intense, grassy flavour.
The oil is canned right after the press, our label is slapped on the can and it’s shipped off to London to adorn your larders!
