21 Ottobre
Fall has arrived here with some cold fronts to remind us what awaits. The "Piedi Rossi" wines are reposing in barrel and stainless steel tank, so our attention has turned to the olives. It started out a very rainy year until mid July when the faucet turned off for 7 weeks. In the last 2 weeks, we have received enough rain to plump up the suffering olives which were taking on raisin characteristics during the dry period. We started out with a load of 230 kg, from which we obtained only 12 liters of oil and then yesterday, you can see in the photos, the fruits of our labor-350 kg of lechino olives and we don't know exactly what was extracted yet as we left them in the hands of our neighbor at the mill.
I have also posted some photos of Raffaele and Gianfelice stomping the 2nd batch of grapes, which were syrah and petit verdot varieties.
Last weekend we hosted our old tutor Corrado and his new bride Amy, who was my roommate for a short time during the master program. They brought 12 family members and we had a great couple of days with cooking, shopping, sightseeing, etc. They bought 9 pairs of shoes from my new "find", the shoemaker of Force, so he will be my friend when I visit him again.
Up next, my broker Bill is on his way to visit and we still have another 70 or so olive trees to harvest. I am curious to see if the oil this year is better with the low yield. I stayed up thinking about how much it costs to make a liter of oil with our treatments, my pruning and renting of the mechanical harvester and the mill cost and we are selling our oil for cost. Aii! farming is tough
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1 comment:
Very interesting pics! I have imagined the olive harvest and oil pressing, but it looked nothing like that. Thanks for posting!
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