Bottled gold--aka--olive oil
Our friends Helen and Keith just left–heading back to the Tuscan hills where they make world class green-gold nectar from the olives on their farm.
They have a thousand trees high above the valley of the Arno, south east of Florence.
Last November we went to “help” with the harvest.
Our job was to sort the leaves and branches from the purple green fruit–
–while trying not to crush the newly fallen olives underfoot, and get in the way of the real workers.
These were five and it took them three weeks–(rain stopped play every other day when we were there, which
gave our backs a chance to recover.)
They brush the trees with long poles in downward strokes, teasing the olives onto the nets laid out below.
Fitted to the ends of the poles are what look like pairs of hands, which “clap” pneumatically.
“Well done, olives–but time to go to the press!”
Every two days Keith loads up the van and heads to the frantoio where the olives make the journey from fruit to oil.
Stone pressing is a thing of the past; now the olives are processed by centrifugation–a horrible word but a cleaner method that produces better quality oil.
The unromantic centrifuge
The liquid gold emerging.
A proud moment–for a beginner!
Proud parvenu!
Keith says he gets about a litre of oil per tree.
Last November’s harvest was his all-time second best–that pleased us!
Robin Ellis 
I don’t know about olives, more than just to buy the finished product in the grocery store.
So the liquid gold substance emerging, is that the oil? and if so, is this the first cold pressed.
Thanks for that lesson
yes–the oil looks to me like liquid gold.
So cool. Thanks for this splendid description, including photos. I feel enriched for having read it. Merci.
GO OLiVE OIL!–thanks Steven.
Olive Oil of course was the femme fatale (sort of) in the old Popeye cartoon, the subject of contested ardor between Popeye and his arch nemesis Brutus. Is there something profound in that? Or something silly? Or both? Or neither?
Did you ever see the old Popeye cartoons in the UK? I wonder if French boys and girls ever saw them. Perhaps Popeye doesn’t translate across the Atlantic. Meredith I am sure can tell you about them.
Yes-Popeye and spinach’s potency featured in my childhood.
I loved the moment after he swallowed the tin of spinach. His biceps would swell and his pipe would rise!
Not sure it made me love spinach back then though.
Never thought about why she was called “Olive Oil”–we didn’t know much about olive oil in fifties Britain!
Can’t really figure it out now.
The fact remains that spinach sautéed in olive oil and garlic–is delicious.
Shelley Duvall was perfect in the role in Altman’s movie.
Yes, but Robin Williams as Popeye? That was another story…
Why was she called Olive Oil? Gawd, you can find just about anything on the web with a few minutes of searching. Check this out, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olive_Oyl:
Olive Oyl is named after olive oil, used commonly in cooking or in salads. Creator Elzie Crisler Segar’s newspaper strips also featured a number of her relatives named after other oils, including her brother, Castor Oyl, their mother, Nana Oyl (after “banana oil,” a mild slang phrase of the time used in the same way as horsefeathers, i.e. “nonsense”), their father, Cole Oyl, and Castor’s estranged wife, Cylinda Oyl; more recently, Olive’s nieces Diesel Oyl & Violet Oyl have appeared in the cartoons. Also among Olive’s family are her two uncles, Otto Oyl and intrepid explorer Lubry Kent Oyl. Lubry Kent’s gift to Castor and Olive, a lucky Whiffle Hen, led them into the adventure where they met Popeye. When Bobby London took over the strip from 1986 to 1992, he added the sultry blonde Sutra Oyl, Olive’s cousin.
It seems Mr. Segar had a thing for oil of ALL types!