gets made.
Everyone here in Lunigiana, the northernmost tip of Tuscany, knows something
about olives and their oil. The trees abound here, so it’s relatively easy to produce decent
oil—but making an exceptional product is another matter. You have to work hard and
fast during the harvest; your back and upper-body muscles better be in good shape, and
you better know what you’re doing. Plus, you have to be on good terms with a reputable
frantoio, the place where the olives get squished.
ON several recent, gloriously mild November days, a man named Roberto Magnani—
a neighbor of ours in Castiglione del Terziere—put me through a crash-course in the
creation of divine olive oil, which I will summarize for you.
First, you first need to locate a moderately obsessive-compulsive fellow such as
Roberto (shown above) and hire him to supervise the cultivation and harvesting of your trees. If, like
Antonio and myself, you lack trees of your own but want some experience and are ready
to roll up your sleeves, you offer to lend a hand to Roberto when he’s harvesting his own
orchard. He’ll be amused by your ignorance and touched by your interest, and he’ll tell
you all kinds of stuff you can’t read in how-to books.
Harvesting by hand is time-consuming and tiring yet peculiarly peaceful and
satisfying as well. Roberto cuts down branches of various sizes with a pair of scissors-on-
a-long-stick. He creates heaps of these branches; you take a box to a heap, pick up a
branch in one hand, and run the fingers and thumb of the other firmly along its length,
stripping off the olives. Thudding lightly, most of them will land in your box; some,
however, will land on the nets that Roberto’s spread all around. (You’ll gather them up
later, also by hand—and you’ll have to crouch, which will do a number on your back.)
You perform these operations over and over, stopping occasionally to admire the view
and drink some water.
While you’re working, Roberto will discuss the basics. Never let olives sit
around on the earth for days; they must be picked up quickly once they hit the ground,
else they risk contamination. Harvest the olives before they get too mature; the young
fruit’s oil is lower in acidity and richer in taste. (Plump, ripe olives contain a lot of
water.) Once you bring your baskets and boxes of olives home, remove any leaves
and stems. There’ll be a dismayingly large quantity of these. The frantoio charges
by weight, and while all the leaves and some stems will get rinsed off during the oil-
rendering process, the bits of stem stuck to each individual olive will get crushed along
with its skin, pit, and fruit. Unless you want them to impart a bitter taste to the final
product—and you don’t want that, oh no!—you should pluck them off the fruit. It’s an
activity that Roberto does while watching TV. (Like crocheting, I asked him. Yes, he
answered, grinning.)
Get your harvest to the frantoio no more than five days after you’ve collected it—
the sooner, the better. Make sure you choose a good mill; don’t go where people take a
lot of inferior olives or where production isn’t happening full-time during harvest season,
else your crop will be contaminated by bad olives or poorly maintained machinery.
AND the actual conversion of fruit to oil—how does that happen?
You dump your olives into a big bin. They’re sent whizzing down a slide into a
machine that then shoots them into a big water-bath.
Once rinsed, the olives (by now sans leaves and twigs) are sucked into a pulping machine that churns them for an hour or so, reducing them to a muddy, unattractive paste. This paste is then further spun and extruded; another machine centrifuges it, separating solids from liquids. Finally, oil is parted from water, and what emerges from a spigot—sunny green in color, slightly viscous, and strongly scented—is your oil.
then decant it into airtight containers and store it in a cool dark place until April. Then
you take a bit of it to a lab to be analyzed it for acidity and other factors. And then, like
the proudest of parents, you design yourself a nice label for your newborn oil, and you
hand out bottles of this elixir to your pals.
EVEN two years after it’s made, Roberto Magnani’s olive oil is swoon-worthy.
Here, he said to us after our first day of labor, take this bottle—I gave away all of
last year’s production, and this is the only bottle left from 2010. Use it within the month,
and keep it away from light and heat.
We took that bottle home, assembled a hasty salad of frisee and tender local
greens (rather like Americans’ Boston lettuce), and splashed some of Roberto’s oil and
a bit of vinegar over it. Delicately spicy, silky yet substantial…the oil turned a simple
salad into a treasure. Closing my eyes as I ate, I visualized those small, pale-green orbs
studding Roberto’s silver-barked olive trees… Those edible gemstones.
