Sore But Savvy

Sore But Savvy

     I was exhausted as I dragged myself home to

An Olive Orchard's Essential Elements

Casa della Feritoia that September afternoon in Calitri.  I was dirty, thirsty, and physically drained.  My old sneakers, with tattered toe holes through their canvas sides certifying past loyal service, now retired in Italy for an occasional job or the urge to help someone out, were testament to that day’s hard slog.  Dirt had caked their soles and advanced up across the laces.  It hadn’t stopped me from going inside. As if I were someone desperately seeking their nitroglycerin pills, I’d entered anyway, much to Maria Elena’s dismay.  Although I’d surely hear about it afterwards, I just had to sit down.  Likewise, my old blue jeans with their frayed bearded cuffs had also been savaged.  Their blue had been completely subdued by the beigey-brown clay-like dirt that, with the addition of water, adhered like paste.  I recall how I hadn’t gotten far when I plopped myself down in the IKEA chair there in our kitchen and didn’t move for a considerable period.  Maria Elena now reminds me that any movement on my part would have been doubtful because I was asleep.  I’m no “youngin,” though there are times I still think I am, but I thought I had more energy.  You’d think I’d have learned long ago that there was a big difference between believing something and reality.  Apparently, I hadn’t recalled that theory.  Boy was I deluded.  What amount of oomph I had, had quickly been sapped.  I’d spent a career first sitting in a cockpit, often over 10 hours at a time, then later sitting behind a desk as an engineer.  A work career, primarily while seated, had not been conducive to the physical labor I’d undertaken that day.  I could fantasize all I liked, but truth be told, I was far from being in shape, whatever that is.  Exercise by lifting six ounce goblets of wine really doesn’t constitute a workout, even though I find myself doing far more reps of this form of “exercise” when I’m in Italy.    

I’d gotten up at 6:30 AM.  By a little after 7, long since the first shards of sunlight had broken across the countryside, I’d arrived at the field owned by our friend Giuseppe.  This field, conveniently located out the front door of his home, was being transformed into a new olive patch.  That’s really a misnomer, for more than a patch, it extended beyond a football field in length and took up about 16,400 square meters.  The only thing missing were the olive trees.  I’d be helping get the process of olive oil production underway as part of a team gathered to plant 3-4 foot young trees, about 500 plants in total.  And to boot, we would be doing it the old fashioned way, by hand.  Thankfully, we, or at least I, hadn’t had to prep the field.  That had been done earlier.  Giuseppe, who also owned a vineyard where in the past Maria Elena and I have worked to harvest grapes, had

Out the Front Door into Extra Virgin Olive Oil Country

already taken care of that.  The soil of this large field had already been cleared and tilled, apparently with the aid of farm machinery.  In olden times, oxen would likely have been used to draw a plowshare, but apparently nowadays, a tractor had taken care of that.  Most of the poles that would support the young trees were already in position too.  I’d missed that phase of the operation because the existence of this renewable bio-enterprise was new to me.  I hadn’t known of the unveiling of this new initiative until I’d been invited to join in the planting.  I’d hoped some sort of tractor powered drill or at least something equivalent to those hand-held, gas powered augers used to cut holes for ice fishing had been used to position the poles.  Spread across the landscape, they were placed in long rows 5.5 meters apart, with 5 meters separation planned between trees.  My hope, that machinery would be used, faded when I saw a few remaining poles being hammered into the orchard.  They now stood like candles in a brown frosted cake, in this case not marking longevity, but symbolic of the number of trees to be planted and their locations.  Mamma mia, there were a lot.

All told, verses those 500 plants, there were about 9 of us.  Together, we would be creating a leafy plot for a true superfood.  I was eager to take part and help make it happen.  I knew some of the team from the days Mare and I had picked grapes.  There was of course, the man behind the project, Giuseppe.  We had known Giuseppe from the day we’d stopped to visit his cantina in the basement of his home and sample the wine he’d crafted from his vineyard.  I still have the note in my computer that got our attention and put us there in the first place:

“There is a great local wine producer that sells his home-made wine. The name of the wine is La Guardia ("The Warden") - the fellow who produces and sells the wine is the former traffic warden of Calitri, hence the name.  Location: take the road leading to the Sigma Supermarket.  Go past Sigma, and also past a tractor depository.  On your left, you will reach the very large Di Maio bus parking area.  In front of it you will see a sign saying, "La Guardia."

With that ad, we’d been off.  Years have passed

Demetrio and Mario

since that chance visit, long enough for a small history to form between us.  In the meantime, Giuseppe, along with his wife Vincenzina, have become good friends.  We look forward to seeing them with each stay in Calitri.  Giuseppe is a gentleman with a quiet demeanor.  A policemen’s training has taught him how to deal with people.  It’s hard for me to imagine him ever giving someone a parking ticket, if that’s what a “traffic warden” actually does.  A generous, considerate soul, I still recall the time he came to our door to see me when I was down with a bad back and couldn’t walk, let alone get out of bed going on a week or so.  He hadn’t brought me wine that time, but crutches!  Meditating on fate, I sometimes wonder how different our lives would have been if we hadn’t stopped by his cantina that day.  Now it appeared, Giuseppe was entering the olive business.

Also, along with us was Giuseppe’s brother-in-law, Mario, visiting from Milan; our English

Giovanni, "Il Patrono" Giuseppe, and
Gerry Take a Break

expat friend Gerry; Gerry’s neighbor Vito and his son, Demetrio.  And then there was a rather jovial strongback of a chap, Giovanni, who besides harboring the brawn and stamina of a bull, possessed a good natured personality.  We were also accompanied by quiet Mimmo, short for Domenico, a familiar presence at the numerous vendemmia (grape harvests) we’d participated in over the years.  For some reason, he reminds me of that former Italian-American legendary heavyweight, Rocky Marciano, who I’d watch on the “Gillette Cavalcade of Sports” TV show each Friday night in the late 50’s with my dad, another Mimmo.  To this day I still hum that jingle.  The opposite of Giovanni, Domenico is very quiet.  Mostly a listener and though short on words, he’s the type you’d want around for this sort of labor, where silence

Rocky Marciano - My Imagined Domenico

works just fine. 

Finally, there was Salvatore, whose name I learned only recently.  I’d not encountered him anywhere in Calitri before.  Like some creature of the fields, he too operated in silence off by himself a few poles ahead along the line.  He reminded me of a modern dwarf warrior from middle-earth, this one clean shaven.  He could have been younger or older than me; It was impossible to tell.  To buttress my pride, I certainly hoped younger, for he worked, never tiring, like the “Eveready Energizer Bunny.”  He was short and hobbit-like, built close to the ground with a low center of gravity that would seem to make it tough, if not impossible, to push him over.  Like a warrior, he wielded a distinctive tool, unlike any of the others, certainly mine.  Instead of having two opposing points in the shape of a ‘T’, his featured two hoe or adze style blades connected in an inverted U-shape that he swung like a pick-axe.  With one mighty swipe both blades stabbed the earth.  Then

Salvatore with His Mighty
Orchard Slayer

with a levering push on the handle, clods of earth erupted as the terrain reluctantly allowed a hole to form. 

Olive trees thrive in harsh conditions.  Like the working conditions we faced that day, it is best to be hot, dry, and the soil hard enough that it resists a plant’s probing roots, or in our case, our tools.  True to form, the soil was hard and clay-like, unwilling to yield an inch.  Unlike soft yielding earth with an organic feel of loam. it lacked the malleability of garden variety soil and had a consistency more like cement.  It would break-up into large chunks when it eventually yielded to our blows, requiring additional stabs of a shovel before it would crumble any further.  By some grand design, olive trees have to struggle to stay alive, their energy to survive eventually shared with their fruit. 

There were a number of remaining tasks to be performed to get the orchard started.  First off, plants had to be delivered to each post and holes had to be dug beside each pole.  In retrospect, oh how I’d have loved to have seen machinery used in the process, but it wasn’t to be.  So for each plant, a hole had to be dug by hand.  With the holes dug, the young trees had to be removed from their containers and placed in the holes.  Then like all good diggers and fillers, soil needed to be replaced and repacked, void of any air spaces around the root ball of the plant.  The final step before adding water was to tie each plant to a pole using a plastic zip tie.  And thus it went, over and over and over and over.

Giuseppe Lays Out Each Young Tree

Other than Gerry and I, the others were familiar with what had to be done.  Some may have had their own olive fields.  I’d no idea other than that hundreds of trees needed to get in the ground, and at that point I didn’t even have a pair of gloves to my name in Italy.  Gerry, Salvatore, and I were primarily the digger detail.  It was a tough assignment although there was no assigning.  We didn’t pull straws or flip a coin.  There was no lining up with volunteers taking a step forward for this or that job.  You simply picked up a tool and went to work.  In any case, first timers like Gerry and myself hadn’t the seniority of the others.  It would take time, a blister or two, or someone leaving before we’d work our way up to a cushy job like fastening zip ties.  Eventually, where in this case “eventually” is the operative word for the time lapse that equated to a lot of activity, all the plants would be fixed to the earth and it was Mother Nature’s job to nurture the orchard and inflate the olives.  Although some of

With Salvatore Blazing Trail, We Play in the
Soon to Be  Orchard  

the trees came with the bonus of a few olives, it would be a gradual three to four year evolution.  In this, the planting phase, you’re done when they’re all in the ground or you are utterly exhausted, whichever occurs first.  Mine was definitely the latter case.  A trip to Naples to pick-up guests the following day put me out of contention as a next day worker.  Right then I was glad for the chance to retire from the olive tree planting phase, no certificate of completion necessary.  At my age, a few hours of olive farming were enough for a lifetime.  I’d discovered my calling; I was more an accomplished olive oil drizzler than olive tree planter.

So, in about 3-4 years, another adventure

Making Progress
Vito, Domenico, and Demetrio

will begin, the first raccolta delle olive (olive harvest).  We hope to be there because we’ve not yet experienced picking the fruit itself which I suspect ends when there are no more olives on the trees.  This is another labor intensive job, but as with tractors for digging and tilling, there are ingenious mechanical devices to help out in harvesting olives (after ad: Olive Harvest Tools).  I like the tool with the “wiggling fingers” at the end of a long pole myself, but even those would lead to really soar arms after a day of it.  But where is the romance in all this technology?  No chance to talk with others, share stories, tell a joke, sing a song, laugh, or just listen to lovely Italian being spoken.

Whatever the harvesting method, the next step is to extract the oil.  In the past, along with Giuseppe, we’ve watched this most important final phase where hampers of olives were mashed beneath millstone size rollers.  As for the science of olive oil, for us it began when we hesitated to read the designer labels on the back sides of those gorgeous bottles in American supermarkets.  We were curious.  Why couldn’t we find any that tasted so alive like the oil we so enjoyed in Italy?  Does anyone bother to read labels?  Have you ever taken a moment to read the label on the back of that bottle of olive oil sitting in your kitchen?  For years we

Maria Elena Examines a Mature Olive Tree in
Anticipation of What Is to Come

hadn’t.  After all, weren’t olive oils alike?  Having had the privilege to sample the delicate, peppery, grassy green stream of extra virgin olive oil (EVOO) flowing from the frantoio (oil mill) spout in Aquilonia, a neighboring town to Calitri, let’s just say we’d grown suspicious.  Since then, we’ve mended our careless ways and became far more selective in the oil we use, beginning when we first turned those fancy supermarket bottles around to check their small print specs.  The unobvious truth had brought the thrill of an epiphany.  Brandishing outright apostasy, we defected from pretend oils in favor of an informed choice.

To begin with, if you can find one, it’s best to check for a harvest or pressing date.  Hopefully, there is one.  Also, look for certifications such as

Fountain of Youth? - The Greenish-Gold
Finished Product 

the Extra Virgin Alliance (EVA) or 100% Quality Italiana.  If none of these is found, best give that bottle a pass.  As with fruits and vegetables we so carefully examine for freshness, an olive oil’s freshness is key to its culinary and health benefits.  Freshness is the biggest problem with oil sold in the US.  Most Americans have no idea what fresh pressed oil tastes like.  Being in a bottle you can’t give it a sniff or gentle squeeze, so a recent harvest date is essentially a measure of its freshness.  Oil is at its best within six months of harvesting, with anything over a year wisely left on the shelf.  It’s the time between pressing and arrival on your table that is the number one killer of olive oil if it was actually extra virgin to begin with.  Olive oil, unlike wine, does not improve with time.  It is just the opposite.  It’s at its peak of nutritional perfection and flavor immediately after pressing.  The problem is that the nutrients in olive oil fade by 40% or more when an olive oil is allowed to sit in a hot warehouse or on a store shelf for more than six months, which is commonplace with the oil we find in supermarkets.  I would not be surprised if you came across some aged three to four years.  Oil like that is dull, flat, tasteless, dead, and outright worthless in nutritional value.  The olive is a fruit, naturally nutritious, and olive oil like fruit juice is perishable, which helps explain why fresh-pressed is always best. 

A Typical Stateside Supermarket
"Olive Oil Shelf"

Also, look for a dark container.  This is important because light, like oxygen and temperature extremes, degrades olive oil, destroying flavor and the oil’s health benefits. 

Another easy check may indicate how many hands, from tree to your home, have touched this product.  Much like the “chain of custody” followed in a TV police drama, a “single estate,” where the olive oil travels from a single supplier to you, is best.  When you find a blend of oil from four, five, six sources, even more, you can sense the extensive chain of suppliers, each with different standards, if any, along with related flavor sapping delays that have touched this product as it moved from farm to cargo ship to bottle to warehouse and on to a stint on a store shelf.  “Danger, Will Robinson.”  With so many sources of oil in one bottle, you are dealing with practically an industrial grade mix of cheap refined oils and might as well put in your car.  You’ll feel far more confident in what you are buying finding the name of the small town of that single estate producer on the label.  As with everything else, you get what you pay for.  A 500–750 ml bottle of oil for $6 at Home Goods, Walmart, or Job Lots may not be all you’re hoping for.  Like wine, there are the excellent “top shelf” brands and then there are the “also ran” labels you shouldn’t bet a nickel on.  Imagine the special handling fine wine grapes receive where they are gently laid into boxes to assure they are not bruised or in any way damaged.  With olive oil, Extra Virgin, the “EVOO” I mentioned earlier, is top shelf, distinct from all the others.  Whereas regular olive oil is a blend, including both cold-pressed and processed oils, EVOO is made from pure, cold-pressed olives, never heated, without involving chemicals, and featuring a low acidity (<0 .8="" span="">

Then there is the matter of taste.  In one of our earliest visits to Italy, I recall Pierre Luigi, a Tuscan wine and oil producer outside of San Gimignano in little Ulignano making a point.  He wanted us to notice the lingering, mouth warming peppery finish we were experiencing on the backs of our tongues while sampling his oil.  It was a spiciness that confirmed it was alive and we couldn’t possibly miss.  It was something to that point, we had never experienced with any other olive oil.  Being a fat, olive oil certainly enhances the flavor of food by lending it a rich fruity flavor, transforming ordinary to greatness.  Some EVOO foodies go so far as to say that food is only to have something to pour olive oil on while others bypass the food entirely to sip a tablespoon of this oil directly each day for its health benefits.

Testing olive oil for its quality can’t be overemphasized.  Tests assess the quality of an oil by measuring the key characteristics.  Their presence and intensities are critical in ranking oils.  The amount of oleic acid, for example, is an important measure of an oil’s resistance to oxidation; a low level of free fatty acid (FFA) reflects positively on the condition of the fruit at the time it was crushed and its resistance to heat damage along with a measure of an oil’s peroxide value (PV) where a very low value is desirable.  Ultraviolet absorbency is another critical test for good quality extra virgin olive oil where an elevated level of absorbance indicates oxidation or a poor quality oil.  Then, what is most important is the amount of antioxidant present as measured in polyphenols such as a bioactive compound called hyrdoxytyrosol.  Now there’s a mouthful that doesn’t flip off a peppery tongue easily.  Recent studies indicate that this potent phenol is responsible for many of the health benefits associated with fresh, high quality EVOO. 

I’d never heard of hyrdoxytyrosol but a quick google revealed that in addition to delivering a high dose of helpful antioxidants, serving as a potent anti-inflammatory that’s wonderful for joints, and helpful in the treatment of many diseases associated with oxidative stress, polyphenol hydroxytyrosol is also believed to act as a natural antimicrobial, a strengthener of the immune system, a promoter of healthy liver function, and supports healthy bones and skin.  It all sounded great to me since I could use a tune-up.  But there is more.  Forget about the knees when there is an even greater potential benefit.  A 2019 Temple University medical study¹ involving EVOO, mice, and dementia, surprisingly reported on EVOO's ability to ward off cognitive decline in old age.  It’s so important, I’ll let you check it out for yourself here.  

All that’s needed is the right extra virgin, full of mighty polyphenols.  Come to find out, a high hydroxytyrosol content is assured when olives are pressed while still green, as opposed to being fully matured and black.  The downside is that olives this young yield less oil - only about 10% versus the norm of 30%.  Such a low return costs a producer money since the resulting oil yield is far less.  The end result for a product all at once this fresh, this sweet, delicate, fruity, spicy (aka peppery), and healthful, is a higher cost to the consumer.

In 2011, UC Davis’ Olive Center conducted a study² of off-the-shelf extra virgin olive oils available in California.  Included in this study of 134 purchased samples from all over the state were

The UC Davis
Standout
EVOO 

the five top-selling imported brands in the United States (Filippo Berio, Bertolli, Pompeian, Colavita, and Star) as well as the top-selling brand from California (California Olive Ranch), the top-selling brand from Australia (Cobram Estate), and the top-selling premium Italian brand (Lucini).  The California Olive Ranch oils ranked highest in all the tests conducted, while the five top-selling imports consistently ranked lowest.  An unobvious truth was the finding that whopping 69% of these imported oils claiming to be extra virgin were counterfeits and did not even meet the standards to qualify as extra virgin olive oil.  The UC Davis findings indicated that the samples failed extra virgin olive oil standards for reasons I’ve presented in addition to adulteration by mixing with cheaper refined olive oils as well as processing flaws like sediments.  Recall how I’d said that you get what you pay for?  Indeed, quality comes at a cost.

These days, with each drop of olive oil I drizzle on a salad, on steamed vegetables, even on a toasted slice of hot bread, I have a hard earned appreciation for the work and time involved to create this natural elixir.  A lot of work goes into each bottle beginning with a hole in the ground.  Olive oil is a true bounty worth searching for which I do whenever we run out of the “good stuff” we’ve managed to lug home from Italy in a suitcase.  Whether from Laguria’s famous Taggiasca olives, one of Puglia’s 60 million olive trees, or soon to be Giuseppe’s front yard, the nectar of sun-kissed olive oil with all the purity and quality superlative descriptive adjectives (fresh-pressed, extra virgin, grassy, green fruit, fresh harvested, peppery, aromatic, etc.) is worth the search.  Demand the very, very, best?  In 2020, the prestigious Flos Olei Guide chose Castillo de Canena's “Reserve Picual” extra virgin olive oil from Spain as the best in the world, awarding it the highest possible score (100/100).  But who knows, in a few years (but who’s counting), we may have a pipeline to Giuseppe’s Calitri olive orchard.  For those who can’t wait or get to Italy and be their own importer, the most demanding of oil connoisseurs might scour the world chasing the harvest seasons for 6-month or younger early harvest oils … Spanish EVOO in March, Chilean in June, Australian in September, and fresh-pressed Italian EVOO in December.  But there is an easier way, let someone do it for you.  The Internet offers many such services in addition to contacting Castillo de Canena for its “Reserve Picual” directly.  One I particularly like for its limited size, personalness, and flexibility is The Fresh Pressed Olive Oil Club.  Check it out.  In the meantime, happy hunting.

Remember …

Usa olio vergine di oliva giovane e vino rosso invecchiato (Use young virgin olive oil and aged red wine)!   

From That Rogue Tourist

Paolo

1. https://medicine.temple.edu/news/new-study-temple-shows-extra-virgin-olive-oil-staves-multiple-forms-dementia-mice
2.  https://olivecenter.ucdavis.edu/media/files/report041211finalreduced.pdf