The Dolce Vita Diaries

It might be time to shatter a few illusions. Perhaps you imagined, as I did until a few years ago, that an olive harvest went hand in hand with sunshine, artisanal wicker baskets and long languid lunches. Wrong on all counts. Our first harvest in Loro Piceno several years ago, we enjoyed consistently grey skies, freezing weather and one day it actually snowed. Not even that whispy pretty snow-on-a-sunny-day kind, the grey, drizzly stuttering kind that makes you feel vaguely melancholy. Of course we had to stop harvesting. When it comes to harvesting attire, I’d always pictured people in vests and shorts – insane! Not just because of the cold (that first year, we wore most clothes we owned, elegantly layered, as if we’d been caught in a suitcase-contents blizzard) but also for protection; if you are up in the innards of a Piantone di Mogliano tree, foraging away with your harvesting comb, any bare skin is going to going to come away mucho scathed.

Then the basket thing? Well that image comes from ‘olive oil as hobby’ land. If you have a handful of trees to harvest to make oil solely for home use, then the basket might well come in to play. You can tootle out after lunch, pick a couple of basketfuls and throw them into the communal press for your share of oil. And good luck to you. For us, things are scaled up and deromanticised quite a bit. Huge nets ten metres square and a set of massive tent pegs to keep the bottom end up and the olives from tumbling down the hill, large plastic crates which, when full, weigh around 20kg and a team of earnest workers. It’s a different kind of fun.

The long languid lunch. Hmm. Bear in mind that harvest season generally happens close to the shortest day of the year. Every hour of daylight is a precious thing and the notion that you might waste any more than the very bare minimum on something as decadent as eating is quite wide off the mark. Lunch is necessary (harvesting is proper physical work) but also necessarily speedy – if you’re lucky it’s a quick plate of pasta hurriedly put together by one of the team, if you’re less so it’s a ciabatta sandwich on the run.

So with sentiment cast aside, we can now turn to the real romance of the harvest. Because despite the fact that you don’t look a pretty sight and your belly might ache, the real romance lies in the olives themselves. The romance lies in the miracle that converts these oleaginous orbs into one of the most wonderful products humans have ever chanced upon. And when at the end of a long day’s harvest, you see yours, first a drip then a steady flow, coming out of the olive press, baskets and sunshine and any other fancies, really do pale into insignificance.

Buona raccolta!