So the olive harvest is finally over! We worked in sunshine and in torrential rain (“they don’t show this on the adverts” says Emma).
I mostly did the ‘support work’ of keeping up with the everyday tasks and feeding the workers, helping out for short bursts with the olive picking. Andy, Jonny (who’s now living in the cottage), Tommy and Emma (our friends and regular helpers) and Theresa (our German friend / woofer) did most of the picking.
We put the olives through our winnowing machine, which blows out all the leaves, before storing them in huge tubs of water until they are all picked and ready to go to the mill – it took 1 van, 1 jeep, and 1 car to transport the olives to the olive mill (lagar)and us to the café for coffee and cake while we waited our turn for olive pressing.
Finally it was our turn to get our olives pressed (I’m back home by this point, catching up on emails, housework, and making a pizza for celebratory olive harvest dinner).
We have over 900kg of olives which is more than twice as many as we need to get our own pressing, so the oil we get is only from our own organically managed trees.
After a few hours of waiting (the lagar has a bar!) the oil is ready. We have 121 litres!
Home for pizza and a blind olive oil tasting. We used our new oil, our oil from last year, Tommy and Emma’s oil from this year, a cheap supermarket brand (Lidl) and a premium brand (Gallo Extra Virgin). Tasters were me, Andy, Tommy, Jonny, Theresa and our neighbour Dave. Emma did a fine job of keeping a poker face while we were tasting and commenting, so as not to give away which oil was which. Our oil came out favourite with every taster, and Tommy and Emma’s was a close 2nd. All of us got the two supermarket oils the wrong way around, thinking the cheap one was the premium brand (so maybe if you are going to buy mass-produced oil then you might as well go for a cheaper one?!)
And finally … Jonny is convinced he met Robert de Niro’s dad at the olive mill:
If you’d like to taste some fabulous unrefined, unprocessed, unfiltered Portuguese olive oil (from the very same lagar) for yourself, then check out our friends’ website www.quintafelgar.co.uk where you can find a list of UK stockists, or order online.
What to do? We were so excited about our pond we wanted a quick solution so off went Jonny to buy a big sheet of black plastic, and I found a load of old quilts and some cardboard to put under the plastic to stop it being pierced by stones.
