Aart Heering
If you live in Rome and have friends with an olive grove outside the city, you are blessed. Because of the scarcity of pickers and the wages that have to be paid to them, in the fall an invitation is quickly left to friends and acquaintances to help harvest. And that guarantees a refreshing day in the open air, with a firm footing on the ladder, vain chatting with other pickers, a welcome lunch in the sun and at the end of the day enjoying a can of fresh, self-harvested olive oil.
The satisfaction is extra great this year, because the picking campaign is one of the few occasions in which a crowd (gathering) without mouth caps is possible: distance guaranteed, fresh air and no outsiders.
Last Sunday the time had come for a colleague in La Sabina, the area northeast of Rome where the first Romans kidnapped young women to stimulate the demographic development of their city. Not very subtle, and the Romans still aren't, but effective: Rome grew rapidly out of its seams and the Sabine Virgin Robbery became a favorite theme in literature and painting.
Some 2.750 years later, the Sabina still offers a lovely landscape, with green hills, rustic winding roads (where you have to drive almost blind after sunset, but that aside) and medieval settlements with fairytale names like Cantalupo, Monteleone, Casperia and Montesola.
And of course olive bongerds everywhere, because l'olio della sabina is a household name in Italy. It is actually surprising that this region near Rome (about 50 km) is still so little discovered by tourism, apart from a handful of Dutch people who have acquired real estate here for prices significantly lower than those of Tuscany or Piemonte. But maybe it should stay that way.
The picking itself, under a pleasant autumn sun and with a lightly palpable breeze, followed the usual scenario: laying out safety nets, putting ladders against the tree, armed with a plastic rake and then just rimming, branch by branch. When a boom is done, roll in the nets and empty the catch into the crate.
It takes quite a while before such a crate is full, because olives for the oil – for the enthusiasts: in this case the cultivars oil mill, lick en carbon cello – are much smaller than most consumer olives and, if all goes well, have not aged a lot: small, green and hard, you will not get the highest yield, but the highest quality, soft and round in taste and with a low acidity.
Lunch is rural and plentiful, but without wine, because experience shows that afternoon productivity drops dangerously. And then comes the final piece: the journey to the oil mill, the press.
It is located in Montebuono, a little further away, where the locals have their oil pressed. Everyone follows the process closely to ensure that the product comes 100% from its own olives, which are of course also the best.
The millstones of yesteryear have now given way to advanced equipment. That comes at the cost of a bit of romance, but it remains high-quality cold pressing and it goes a lot faster, while the modern transformation process – cleaning, grinding, pressing, centrifugation – also has its charm.
And then there's oil! Oil nuovo, that is to say: bright green, soft and fruity with that little bit of tingling that soon disappears, but with which you can now, with or without garlic or tomato, taste the tastiest bruschetta can make of the year. I would never want to miss it!
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