Olive Harvest

Real Travel magazine

Winter 2008

Words and Photography

There are many ways to harvest an olive tree for its fruit. You can shake its trunk with a tractor, use a pneumatic rake, or beat it with a stick. Alternatively, you can pluck each olive by hand. But, before you do so, consider this: it takes five kilos of olives to make one litre of oil; and once you start picking, you have just 24 hours to press your harvest before the fruit begins to ferment. Olive pickers must work in a team, and fast.

Families throughout the Mediterranean countryside have done this for thousands of years. Five people can harvest ten or twenty trees in a morning using just their fingers or a special hand comb. Substitute an industrious farming family for a group of talkative British women on their travels and the result is, predictably, a much smaller yield.

Olive picking is about as physically demanding as collecting conkers. The repetitive nature of fruit picking combined with being in the sun for a week and eating nutritious food probably accounts for why I returned to England feeling like I'd spent a week in a retreat centre.

I travelled with the UK conservation charity BTCV who run three week-long olive picking trips to Spoleto in Umbria every autumn. The group of nine volunteers included two nurses, an IT manager, a forensic scientist and a speech therapist. Olive picking in the grounds of an 18th century Italian villa had much romantic appeal and I should say that all volunteers, bar two, were female.

From day one, it was clear that the level of comfort was going to be higher than on your average working holiday. Having collected us from the train station in Spoleto, our host insisted on stopping at the local vineyard en route to the estate. With a boot full of luggage and, it turned out, more wine than the group could drink in a week, we headed for Villa Pianciani nestled on a hilltop just outside Spoleto.

Motoring up the cypress-lined drive past wildflower meadows and olive orchards, the peach mansion villa came into view and I felt as though I should be in a Victorian horse-drawn carriage at the start of a Grand Tour. Picture the rural Italian scenes in the film A Room with a View and you have something close to the landscapes. The volunteer accommodation was a rustic 17th century farmhouse downhill from the mansion house. On arrival, the cheerful estate staff popped open several bottles of red and we sat outside chatting until the sun dropped behind the hills. Inside, the wood fire had warmed the upstairs bedrooms, which overlooked sweet chestnut trees, acres of olive groves and distant hillside hamlets.

The Pianciani estate was once the country residence of a noble family of the same name but fell into disrepair after the WWII. The family's ancestors are now restoring the villa, gardens and parkland to their former grandeur. One quiet afternoon I had a peek inside the villa and found beautiful frescos on the walls depicting country life in the 1700s. In the old entrance hall, the walls and ceiling were painted with scenes from a garden in summer: roses growing up trellises, a peacock wandering through a formal garden and wild birds flying over a fountain. Outside, the real gardens had deteriorated a lot since the artist took up his palette all those years ago, and the dry-stone walls, architectural features and rose garden were clearly in need of expert attention. It was close to here a few years ago that BTCV volunteers uncovered an overgrown secret garden complete with fountain and sundial.

BTCV volunteers have been drafted in to work in the organic olive groves which are rich in wildlife. The trees and surrounding meadows have been undisturbed for many years so owls, woodpeckers, butterflies and rare plants like bee orchids have all taken up residence. I found it enchanting to stroll through the groves in the early morning as the mist was clearing. The smell of wild thyme and mint was strong and I enjoyed watching the peacocks picking at the grass, and birds flying between olive boughs. It is hoped that once the groves are commercially profitable, they will support environmental projects and restoration work on the villa and gardens.

Every day after breakfast, we began harvesting the olive trees that surrounded the farmhouse. The process was simple: first, we dressed the tree in a net skirt to collect the picked olives and stop them from running downhill; then, ladders were positioned around the trunk so we could reach the tallest branches. This was not always easy on old, twisted olive trees. By the end of the week, we were congratulating each other for good 'laddering' and had mastered the 'octopus' method of picking olives with both hands.

Once a tree had been stripped of its olives, we rolled the fruit to the bottom of the net. Here we would gather around our harvest, picking out the leaves and twigs - and, of course, having a good natter.

'There’s something primordial about a group of women sitting in a circle chatting and doing agricultural work,' observed one of the volunteers.

Meal times were a real treat. A young local woman arrived every morning with fresh ingredients and spent the four hours we were in the groves, preparing a delicious two-course lunch. Stuffed with pasta, home-made pizzas, salads, soups or casseroles, there was always time for a quick nap before heading back out into the field for the remainder of the afternoon.

The week's harvest was broken up with a trip to Spoleto and a tour of an old olive-pressing farm which is now a museum that showcases the machinery once used to make oil. It doesn't sound interesting, but believe me, when you have spent five days immersing yourself in the traditions of olive oil production, 1950s pressing devices and ceramic storage pots the size of a child, are quite absorbing.

On the penultimate day of the holiday we made a final trip to the modern olive-pressing farm, known as a 'frantoio'. I say modern, but it was actually another magnificent 18th century estate on a hillside. People were coming and going with their crates of olives and the frantoio seemed to be a meeting place where local men caught up on town gossip as they helped load each other’s olive oil into trucks. At one point a smartly dressed old man came in and was warmly greeted by the owner. He explained that he spent his working life at the frantoio and remembered the days when olives were crushed using huge wheels made of stone. Now the process is highly mechanised.

We watched as our 20 yellow crates full with purple, black and green olives were emptied into one large container and weighed. The olives were then sucked, washed, spun, crushed and purified through several connected machines in a single room. At every stage we peered into the machines’ workings and followed the chain of production. At the end of a series of pipes was a tap from where metal containers were filled with our pure cold-pressed olive oil. The strong and spicy oil was like no other I have tasted.

Undoubtedly the most taxing aspect of the olive harvest holiday in Umbria was trying to lug several litres back to Rome and the UK. Luckily I was travelling on the train with no weight restrictions on my luggage, so one year on, I am still enjoying salads made with my own olive oil. I even had enough to bottle up and give as Christmas gifts. Like a scene from a Nigella Lawson Christmas goddess special, I smugly handed round my hand-made presents.

Producing Olive Oil

Making olive oil is a tradition that pre-dates the Romans by at least a few thousand years. The pressing machinery may have changed, but small groves in the countryside are still harvested in the traditional way. On every hillside I saw families picking olives by hand from early in the morning until sunset. The flavour and colour of each oil depends on the variety of fruit (there are hundreds in Italy alone) and environmental factors such as the soil and climate. They can be nutty, fruity, mild, or spicy.

Once the olives have been picked they must be pressed without delay. Hot pressing produces more oil, but vitamins and anti-oxidants are lost in the process so cold-pressed oil is considered superior.

A vacuum separates the leaves, and the fruit is cleaned in a machine that shakes like a rudimentary washing machine.

The olives are fed into another device which churns them into a purple paste. The water is then removed using a centrifuge.

The paste is put through more water-extracting machinery and filtered. All that remains is a blond oil that flows out of a pipe and into stainless steel containers.