Pressing forward
Drought and other challenges plague newcomers hoping to make olive oil in Italy. Cain Burdeau explains their trials.
CASTELBUONO, ITALY Our first gruelling, knee-killing, bumbling and comically great olive season finally feels like it is over.
We are rich in a new way: More than 70 litres of dark green, corpulent and peppery olive oil have been produced.
During the summer, my wife and I were gloomy. There was the prospect of not having any oil for a second disappointing year. We moved to the Madonie mountains in north-central Sicily in no small part to enjoy making oil from some 40 trees on the country property we purchased.
But disastrous drought and extreme heat hit Sicily and Italy hard. Between April and the start of October, only 178 mm of rain fell into our rain gauge.
“Due to the drought, there could have been the problem that the olives wouldn’t have produced any fruit,” said Francesco Raimondo, an oil maker who runs a mill in Castelbuono that his grandfather started in 1955.
He said in November, the olive presses had been clanking and whirring, and crates and bags heavy with olives were hauled in by farm trucks, atop tiny Fiat cars and in the backs of cars.
Still, production, Raimondo said, was off by half.
“This was supposed to be a good year, full. But the plants went into stress due to the drought,” he said.
When we arrived in September 2016, we’d looked forward to picking olives. But that first harvest was destroyed by the olive fruit fly. Now the enemy was heat, drought and scirocco winds.
Wells ran dry and gardens were limp lifeless places. At the plumber’s shop, pumps were bought and old ones fixed. Fountains were shut off. Even household water was rationed.
Finally, in October, as though out of nowhere, plump, black olive fruit appeared. And then more and more. We took our nets, rakes, crates and saws down to the first tree.
Off to work we went. We first picked up fallen olives, which can be used as salted table olives. Then, we attacked the “olive jungle,” as I called our unruly trees left for years without a good pruning.
In the Madonie mountains, olives are picked mostly by hand, due largely to the landscape of steep hills and mountain slopes. Many families make oil just for domestic needs. We did the same.
Our initiation was anything but easy. To pick olives, you first lay down large, nylon nets. Then, using rakes, clappers, poles or your hands, you strip olive branches of their fruit. After a tree is done, you pick up the net and collect the olives in it.
Simple enough, right? Not so fast. Nets got stuck on our uncut grass and wild plants. We slipped, and occasionally fell. We twisted and turned and tried every possible position to get our heavyduty construction ladder into trees. We struggled to get olives that were entangled in “secco,” a thick dry web of branches in each of our uncultivated trees.
And on it went for an entire month. We stood high in the trees, got poked in the eyes by the secco, talked for hours and worked in silence for even longer; we admired dawns and dusks, worked with friends, and watched with satisfaction as the first olive oil was made at the mill; we climbed onto massive tree limbs and worried about falling; we killed our backs with long rakes and wondered why in the world we were going to so much effort for a few olives dangling high up there out of reach.
And we ate voraciously, to satisfy our work appetite.