Harvest 2024 (part 2)
- Alex Subrizi
- Nov 10, 2024
- 7 min read
Updated: Apr 8
Fallen telephone cables notwithstanding, we managed to pull 590 kg of olives from around 200 of our trees today, bringing the total weight harvested this year to 1010 kg: just a shade shy of last year's crop but, frankly, pretty slim pickings for 200 olive trees. Considering that the majority of our trees are, since 2022, in a multi-year process of "reforming" (deep pruning towards a policonic vase shape), and that close to half our total trees hardly had any olives, I was glad that our harvest didn't fall further than around 40 kg year-on-year.
Over two thirds of today's haul came from our lower grove and around half of those two thirds from just five more or less abandoned trees on the northern border of our campo rozzo, unpruned and unkempt, improbably tall and teeming with fruit. Over half of today's harvest was brought to Grevepesa's T.E.M. line within an hour of the last olives being pulled from those overfull trees, and virtually none of the olives in this year's filtered evoo will have spent more than 12 hours off the tree that matured it before being crushed and processed. Olive oil made this way is rare, in part because most olive farms are larger than ours, which makes bringing even a portion of the crop to the mill within hours of harvesting impractical. And many olive mills can get pretty backed up in November, which means olives can sit around their receiving areas for the better part of a day before being milled.
Although one of Grevepesa's lines did have some downtime yesterday, our olives were processed only 80 minutes behind schedule. It's 11 PM as I write this; less than an hour ago I brought home 69 liters of filtered, brilliant yellow-green T.E.M.-processed evoo.
As noted in my earlier post on this year's harvest, the T.E.M. line (product brochure here), owing to its slower, less kinetic and temperature-regulated approach to oil extraction, as well as its vertical mixing tanks, is reputed to produce evoo that is minimally oxidized, with higher tocopherol (vitamin E) and polyphenol content, thanks in part to no water being added in the final phase of extraction. I have yet to taste tonight's oil, and in the next couple of days I'll be taking a sample of it to ISVEA for a full analysis [edit: ISVEA's report just delivered. See my Nov. 13th update below].
On a personal level, this harvest was special, falling as it did between my 61st birthday (Monday the 11th) and my partner Giovanna's 44th (Friday the 8th). We were joined by my eldest son Elio and his girlfriend Alice, by Daniela and Roberta, two of my paternal first cousins, one of whom was accompanied by her husband Beppe and daughter Marta (those four drove 350 km from Piedmont), by my maternal first cousin Maurizio and his wife Sonia (who fed us a mouth-watering arista roast for lunch), and by two close friends, Stefano and Flavia, whose daughter attends third grade with our son Max. The weather was spectacular. The feeling of sharing such an important and beautiful day with so many people dear to me was the greatest birthday gift I could have.
Update, November 13: Tasted the oil on Sunday. It's forward and strong on the palate, lingering in the throat, with chlorophyll and thistle notes and a bitter finish (indicating substantial polyphenol levels). ISVEA just emailed me the results of a comprehensive lab analysis. Acidty is 0.21%, lower than the unfiltered evoo we produced on October 31st, which we submitted for analysis a week ago. Peroxides are 6.0 meq O2/kg and polyphenols 429 mg/kg (well above the EU's 250 mg/kg "high polyphenol" floor).
Today's lab report, more complete than the one we ordered a week ago, also shows a 210 mg/kg value for tocoferol (Vitamin E). Great numbers. Feels good to see them as support for several notions. First, it suggests that the T.E.M. process generates higher polyphenol content. The difference to the polyphenol levels in the unfiltered evoo we produced using the Pieralisi process on October 31st is significant. Granted these are not the same trees or olives, but the 25% higher value seems to favor the slower T.E.M. process (see my "part 1" post for a description of the pros and cons of the Pieralisi process). Second, it's probable that the further ripening and integration of October's record rainfalls over nine additional days of sunshine favored both polyphenol and tocoferol numbers [edit: a second test of polyphenol content conducted in early February 2025 and yielding a whopping 528 mg/kg further strengthens this hypothesis]. Acidity, at 0.21%, is remarkably low, but I will allow that the gap with the 0.49% acidity of our 2023 evoo may be due in part to our ordering a lab analysis on that oil 90 days after processing. I'll have ISVEA run a second acidity test of our 2024 filtered evoo in the first half of February and see if the value has crept towards last year's 0.49 [edit: see my February 14th "post-postscript" below; ISVEA's Feburary 11th analysis showed acidity as essentially unchanged.]. Third, and above all, this year's two ISVEA reports are a terrific showing for our olive groves, the organic fertilizers we use, and the tight time interval we maintain between the moment our olives are pulled from their trees and the moment they're pressed to make oil.
Postscript, November 14: Labels affixed to tins of our 2024 filtered evoo note "November" as the month of production. Now that I've started sticking those labels on tins, it's occurred to me that I can't recall the last time we harvested olives in November. Even this year's Halloween harvest was late by our standards, and now that we've veered into November, I'm asking myself why, back even when my dad was running the harvests here, an October harvest became the norm.
Traditionally, in most regions of central and southern Italy where olives are grown, the harvest began in mid-November and often carried into early, even mid-December. Word is that at some point folks in this area started to feel that harvesting earlier might lend their oil a cleaner, greener, spicier character, due to a significant portion of the crop being unripe. It's true that overripe olives can lead to oils with higher acidity and peroxide (oxidation) levels and that higher values of these parameters can spoil an olive oil's taste. But as I handled and inspected the olives we pulled from our trees last Saturday, November 9th, they did not seem overripe at all. Nor do their chemical properties indicate that they spent too much time on the trees. Could it be, I wondered the other day, that local growers began harvesting earlier simply as a matter of convenience? Days are "longer" before the switch to European Standard Time that precedes the last week of October: an extra hour to round up the day's work before darkness falls. Whatever the case, this fall's abundant rainfall pushed lots of folks to harvest in November rather than October and I won't be surprised if the practice takes hold again. We'll see.
Post-postscript, February 14: I took a 25 ml sample of our 2024 filtered evoo to ISVEA this past Monday to see if, as posited above, acidity and oxidation increase in the first 90 days of storage post-pressing. Since one can order as many as three parameters froma 25 ml sample, I also asked ISVEA to test the oil's polyphenol content, even though we already had a satisfyingly high value for polyphenols from the analysis ISVEA ran in November, four days after pressing our 2024 oil. To a greater extent than I imagined possible, the analysis showed that oil produced in small batches can vary somewhat in polyphenol content, even within a single harvest. I was also reassured to learn that values such as oxidation and acidity that one would expect to degrade in storage hardly budged from early November 2024 to early February 2025. Here's the report:
Acidity is up by 0.04 but that's within the stated plus or minus 0.06 margin of error. Oxidation, at 5.7, is down by 0.3, also within the test's margin of error. These values suggest that our method of storing our evoo (in 30-liter sealed stainless steel vessels in a dark cellar that never gets very hot or cold) has negligible affects on acidity and oxidation, at least in the first 90 days post-pressing. They also suggest that the marked reduction in the acidity of our 2024 evoo (relative to our 2023 oil) was due not to the timing of the analysis, as I suspected above, but to the quality of our olives and perhaps also to our even more determined efforts to press most of them within 8 hours (and virtually none beyond 12 hours) of pulling them from our trees. What further impressed and pleased me was that the February 11th test's result for our 2024 filtered evoo's polyphenol content, at 528 mg/kg, was 99 mg/kg higher than the value we obtained in November's analysis of the "same oil". This latest polyphenol figure is within a whisker of 2023's 530 mg/kg value, and both those values are simply stunningly high (more than double the EU's 250 mg/kg "high polyphenol" floor). But why the 99 mg / kg gap up relative to the November analysis? Well, they're two different samples, drawn from two different 30-liter vessels, which were filled with evoo from, yes the same harvest, but not exactly the same olives, obviously. So of course the value will be different, and it was gratifying to see the variation in polyphenol content move strongly into positive, not negative territory. I am proud to call this evoo our own. ♥️
Post-post-postscript, April 8: News recently reached us that our 2024 filtered evoo placed in the top 25% of entrants in an international olive oil tasting competition in Paris! ♥️♥️
Congrats on a job well done! Anne and I were there in spirit! (not a lot of help, I know! )