Moon over Martinborough

Washed olives going into the press

Rick and I drove up to the olive press and looked in through the ornate metal gate.

It was dark out, and the lights were still on inside. Diane of ‘Pressing Engagements’ was still pressing olives. She works furiously throughout May and June, then things go quiet for the olive presses of the Wairarapa valley.

We wanted to pick up our oil and get it home to taste it right away, in order to see if the frosts had damaged the taste. We’d gone to great lengths on harvest day to make sure we’d sorted out as much frost-damaged fruit as possible. But were our efforts enough?

Diane smiled when she saw us. “Your oil is beautiful,” she said immediately, and then waved us in through the gate.

Does she say that to all the boys?

Olive oil report card

She gave us a piece of paper which reported on our pressing. In total we had 383 kilos of olives (844 pounds). It took Diane about 11 hours to press them all. We got 48 liters of oil out of it (about 13 U.S. gallons).

Our ‘yield’ was 12.6% – much less than the 16% we got from the Frantoio and Leccino in our last harvest.

“In the past two weeks, everyone’s yield has dropped,” Diane said. “I talked to the press up in Masterton, and the same thing’s happening there.

“Why?” I asked. I’d been running figures based on 400 kilos of olives at 16% yield, so I was expecting 64 liters of oil, not the 48 we had in front of us.

She reached over and touched a blue bucket full of someone else’s olives waiting to go into the pressing room. “The rain,” she said.

Over the past two weeks, the rain had been incredible. Olives soak up water, and of course water is heavy. Since yield is a measure of the weight of the olives compared to the amount of oil they give off, rain-soaked fruit gets a lower yield.

Diane picked up an olive out of the bucket and turned it in her fingers. It was smallish and dark. She moved slowly, no doubt exhausted from her 13 hour days.

Sludge coming out one side

“The low yield doesn’t necessarily mean your olives had less oil,” she said. “It means they had more water. That’s all.”

From a grower’s perspective, the main problem with pressing rain-soaked fruit is that it’s extremely expensive. Olive presses charge per kilo of fruit pressed, so you’re paying to press out a lot of heavy water.

Compared to our last harvest, when the weather was dry and our yield higher, this year’s pressing costs were almost double per liter of oil obtained.

Stunning oil

“But oh,” Diane said. “The oil you have is gorgeous. So clear.” She smiled brightly. “You’ll have almost no sediment. You’ll be able to drink most of it.”

She pointed to our report card. It said, “Oil colour: Vibrant rich green. General comments: Clear oil – stunning!”

Only later would we learn later that Diane was so impressed with the quality of our oil that she was even telling our neighbors about it. She told John, when he came in to press his fruit, that our oil was some of the most beautiful she’d ever seen.

“It’s stunning?” I asked her.

“Stunning,” she said.

Rick and I felt like small children who’d received gold stars on our foreheads. The oil was clear and beautiful, but how would it taste? We had to get it home.

Diane had filled only one of our four containers – the 50 liter one. I’d spent an incredible amount of time cleaning out the other containers on a horrible rainy day two weeks before. It was wasted time. Yet there’s no greater Olive Press Sin than dropping off your olives and not leaving sufficient containers for your oil. At least we’d avoided that.

Rick and I lifted the heavy stainless steel container together and put it in the hatchback of our little, two-door, city-boy Nissan Pulsar. It felt silly putting such an industrial olive oil container in the back of such a wimpy car.

We need something like a macho pick-up truck for life out in the country. We’re probably in breach of some rural ordinance, driving a Nissan Pulsar.

Bringing home the oil

We drove away from the olive press and the nearby town square and left the village of Martinborough behind us in the dark. We headed down the country roads that lead to our property.

In the village, there are streetlights, but there are none where we live. There’s no town water either; we rely on a well. Only the electrical lines connect us to civilization.

Rick and I carried the oil inside the house and set it down in the guest lounge of the B&B. It was in a corner near the breakfast table. In the winter, when we have fewer B&B guests, we tend not to use that room, and the oil was out of the way there. But seeing that large silver container next to the table, it almost looked like another guest ready to pull up a chair.

We unscrewed the wide-mouthed lid and dipped in a ladle, poured some into a clear glass, then carried the glass to the kitchen.

Standing together around the large island at the center of the kitchen, we held the glass to the light. It was true what Diane had said about the color. It was such an intense, rich green that it looked almost luminescent.

The Italians call freshly pressed oil ‘olio nuovo’ – new oil. Fresh is best with olive oil. If you’ve only ever had the mass-produced supermarket variety, I’m sorry to say that you’ve never really tasted olive oil.

Quality oil

Oil coming out the other side

“Most supermarket oil is rancid,” Helen the Olive Angel of Olivo always says.

She first explained this to me as we were walking through the Olivo grove on a sunny afternoon two years ago. The light was streaming through her trees. “You don’t know where supermarket oil comes from or when it was pressed,” she said. “It’s often five, six years old. Horrible.” She visibly shuddered.

She looked at her rows of beautiful olive trees. “Good oil should be consumed within its first two years of life or it loses its taste. You bring it home from the press and then you let it settle for six weeks. That’s when its flavor is at its peak.”

Fresh oil by the spoonful

Now, as Rick and I stood there in the kitchen, we each held a spoonful of our just-pressed olive oil.

I looked at mine, shining green on the end of silver. It took years to produce this oil, and it took the work of more people than I could count.

This oil went back to Priscilla, who used to own this property and who planted those trees. It went back to Nevil the Nine-fingered Olive Pruner, who’d come in to prune the trees when Rick and I had become overwhelmed. It went to back Michael the Sprayer, who months and months ago had applied organic copper to the trees to prevent fungal disease.

And it went back to the city friends, who’d helped us harvest just two days before, and to our neighbors and to Helen the Olive Angel of Olivo, who let us borrow the equipment we’d needed to do that harvest. It even went to back my American nieces, who’d played tag in the olive grove with Rick and me at the height of summer, just after Christmas. (I was certain their laughter had helped the trees.)

This spoonful of olive oil contained a community.

Rick and I simultaneously opened our mouths and tasted our spoonfuls.

Ahh. There it was. The grassy opening notes, the mild and fruity middle, the powerful bang of pepper at the end.

Yes. We’d saved our oil from the frost. It was absolutely delicious.

We looked at each other in silence, our heads full of the taste of ‘olio nuovo’. There was no need to talk. We both broke into large, triumphant smiles.

____________________

Related posts

Read other stories about:

• the olive harvest
• the olive grove
• pickling olives
• satisfying work

Or read the next post: Strange morning at the chicken run

Related information

• Check out Olivo’s website.
• You can find ‘Pressing Engagements’ olive press at 40 Naples Street in Martinborough. Phone: 06 306 6346.

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 13th, 2009 at 6:12 am and is filed under Food, Neighbors, New Zealand, Olives & olive oil. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.