Tuscan people are rightly very proud of their olive oil, as it is one of the most appreciated in the world. While other Mediterranean regions pick their olives in November, December or even January, the Tuscan harvest begins in October, when the fruit is less ripe and produces less oil making our olive oil rarer than the others. Early harvest offers farmers more guarantees against premature frosts and allows olive pickers to enjoy the warmth from the last sunny autumn days.
Picking olives from the trees is a hard job. On my property it is still done completely by hand with the only help of short plastic rakes that separate the olives from their branches dropping them onto the nets displayed under the olive groves. Besides the nets, we like to cast old silk parachutes from WWII that often need patching for the occasional rips that come from the continuous folding and unfolding over sometimes rugged terrain.
One feels the sense of a shared mission: you win the battle if the harvest is abundant. Picking olives is a cheerful social experience. Young and old work together sharing stories and jokes, helping each other to set the long wooden ladders, moving the nets from tree to tree and collecting fruit into baskets that are ultimately emptied into large boxes. Once collected, the olives are taken to the frantoio, for pressing.
Each frantoio works night and day to give farmers the most purified oil as possible. When my brother comes back home with his car loaded with jars of the newly pressed olio nuovo, his expression reveals if the harvest satisfied his expectations. Even if the conversion of kilos of olives into liters of oil did not break the previous year’s record, the arrival of the liquid gold is always a cause for celebration. Served over toasted slices of homemade bread, the peppery and pungent green juice always pleases our palate.
