Becoming Frantoio Oil

Oct 28

Scuotitore and Operazione

New plastic nets, new wooden sticks, and a beautiful day for harvesting the Frantoio olives growing in this orchard of Peppino. Neatly grown some five meters apart, filling up the space between the secular plants of the local variety Ogliarola Salentina growing in this orchard since way back, I am by Peppino let known that the variety of Frantoio originates from Tuscany, Umbria, and that these particular ones were planted in June 2008; at a time when his son Giovanni, who now runs the machinery, was just a toddler. Making use of a scuotitore, a mechanic trunk-shaking technique by which olives effectively become harvested, and sticks which in a side-down movement hit olives off the branches, plentiful olives fall to the ground. So does branches and leaves, and every once in awhile, albeit attentively positioned on each trunk, through gracious precision enclosing its stemmed configuration, the shaker causes barks to crack, for which reason the team sets out to carefully tape it back together, performing an operazione so to prevent the plant from becoming affected, such as by fungi or other things that might affect the plant.

Rimasti

These olives sit stubbornly hard this year, or *buono accanito* as Peppino has it, and my main task for the day, such as assigned by Peppino and such as carried out by Dina, the wife of his, consists of discovering and handpicking those olives remaining on plants as the trunk-shaking-stick-hitting team moves along, row by row. As I stand close up and within the much aerated vaso-pruned plants, I discover much more than the olives I am to pick, and while the bucket I manage to fill during my hours and hours of scrutinizing the plants does not make much difference in relation to the total amount of olives harvested this forenoon, the other things noted make much intriguing addition to my research. Noted, recorded, and reflected, these things make for curious points of entry as my research moves along, experience by experience.

Thousands and thousands of Frantoio olives arrive within hours from being harvested straight from the orchard to the pressing facility, which funny enough in italian also is called frantoio — in the case of olive oil, frantoio oleario — and which is located just a couple of kilometers away from the orchard. These particular olives are directly to become processed into oil as they are unloaded; not all are, some sit with their container on the top, awaiting their turn to become pressed. Nonetheless, these unloaded olives will together with the thousands and thousands of olives already discharged earlier during the forenoon, in a couple of hours constitute almost 400 kg of monocultivar extra virgin olive oil, Frantoio in kind. Leaves and branches are early on sorted out, allowing only for the olives to move on within the machinery. Indeed of bountiful supply, the leaves become collected and are later returned to be spread in the orchard, acting part of the sustainable management in a circular system of sorts that the organic matter embody.