The olive harvest has come to an end

We have just completed the olive harvest. It took a very long time, six weeks! As you know, the whole of Europe has had a very wet start to winter, with most of northern Europe experiencing snow!

It is very important that we pick the olives on a dry day and take them to the frantoio (olive press) as quickly as possible. If we do not do this, and the olives get wet, they will get moldy and we’ll lose the whole harvest.

We judge the success of the olive harvest on the percentage of oil we receive in proportion to how many kilograms of olives were pressed. The percentage from the first pressing was between 10% and 11%. We were worried that this was what we could expect from the rest of the pressings. But our olive trees did not disappoint us. The last pressing produced a percentage of 17%. Bello!