The Olive Harvest

Well, there wasn't much of it really. Although in September and October things were looking very good, by the time we came to harvest in November the weather (heavy rain and continuous dampness) had destroyed them.

And although we learnt later that most Portuguese producers simply harvest anyway and press them for oil, we thought there was little point and picked out only a few kilograms (actually a few tens of kilograms) of the best ones. (Earlier we'd taken some of the better olives -- the larger ones, both ripe and still green -- for pickling.)

Our original aim was to add our olives to those of a Belgian friend and take them quite a distance to an old-fashioned water-wheel powered press. It sounds like a wonderful old place with stone rollers, drive belts and hand presses. The point is that by combining harvests we would have reached the minimum quantity required to run a batch through the press. By doing that, we are sure that the oil we get came from our own olives (in contrast with last time, when we simply took our few olives to a local 'modern' press and were given an appropriate quantity of oil that had already been pressed. Actually, in that case, 'pressed'is not really the correct term, because the process involves crushing, mixing with hot water and then centrifuging to separate the water and oil.

The old presses, like the one we hoped to use, first crush the olives using under huge stone rollers. The resulting pulp is then spread, by hand, onto sheets that are layered into a press. As the press -- a giant screw mechanism -- is tightened down, the oil escapes and is runs into collecting tanks.

Anyway, the small quantity of olives we had made all this impractical. As a result, we just handed the olives over to a neighbour who took them for processing at another local plant. We will have to hope the harvest is better next year so we can try again. I'm looking foward to seeing a real old plant and receiving oil from our own olives.