2008 Olive Harvest

Our olive trees were looking fairly healthy this year; a reasonable amount of fruit. But with only five or six trees, we have no hope of reaching the minimum batch size required at any of the local presses. So when our friend Dave suggested working together to harvest his and ours, we readily agreed. (He was on his own this year and, with about 40 trees, was keen for some help.)

So, we spent the first couple of weeks of November working together in beautiful weather, mostly on his land but also picking our olives.

We had additional help sometimes, as people dropped by for a half day or whatever they could spare to help out.

Friend Yumi was visiting for a few days and helped out with our trees:

Here's the harvest from our few trees, a handsome 150-170kg:

Because Dave was leaving towards the end of November, we got the harvest in reasonably quickly and managed to get to the oil press in Tojais quite early. As a result, we were able to have the olives processed in just a few hours. (Friends who went a week later had to wait four or five days for their turn...) Here are the olives making their way through the initial batching/cleaning/weighing process:

The hot water used in the press comes from this boiler – which is fired with the waste olive mash left after extracting the oil:

After crushing and then mixing with hot (warm?) water to extract the oil, centrifuges are used to separate oil and water. Here the beautiful yellow-green oil is running out for delivery into tanks – one for each batch:

This is a pretty high-tech press. There are some advantages to that. First, the temperature at which the oil is extracted is said to be lower – less heat means less damage to the flavour. And the modern machinery gives a higher yield too; this time we got about 1.4 litres of oil for every 10kg of olives.

Here's Dave filling our sundry plastic bottles, glass flagons and other containers from the final holding tank:

The whole process – from dumping the olives into a hopper to receiving the oil – took about four hours. Plenty of time to poke around the facility, get a cup of coffee and a cake at a local cafe, and simply sit around enjoying the sun. Had the opportunity to take a good look at the still; making bagasu (grappa) is a sideline at many olive oil presses during the wine making season: