Torri 2--OLIVES!

Our first day at Torri we arrived just as a large group of guests was leaving and we were basically told that everyone was going to relax after luch and we'd discuss our 'jobs' around the dinner table. On day 2 it rained hard in the morning, and it was too wet to pick olives, so we did some cleaning up and then took a nap and read until dinner.

On day three we finally went and picked olives.

We learned that there are many methods for picking olives, including manual, mechanical and even chemical methods for getting the olives to fall into a net so that they can be carted away. Right off the tree they are extremely bitter but apparently the bitterness is in the water soluble fraction of the olive and is removed during the making of oil or by soaking in brine for several months.

Massimo (seen dumping olives into the press above, and below picking olives) uses the very old fashioned method of simply picking the olives and letting them fall into a net placed beneath the tree. This is complicated by the fact that this is very steep terrain and the trees are on terraces so the olives fall down and another net needs to be placed below.

At the end of 3 hours of picking, between Rory, Jasper, Theresa, Myself and Paula (another volunteer), we had the two buckets of olives you see on the wheelbarrow that I'm pushing (below). We picked for 3 days (mostly just in the morning) and ended up with 15 'misures' of olives, each one of which made about 2 liters of oil.

Massimo was quite happy with this and we gained a whole new understanding of olive oil! I was really lucky to get to go to the olive press just down the street, the Ballestra Livia, and watch the oil being made.