Hand picking: picking is a very delicate operation, because it represents the moment in which the fruit of a year’s work is gathered and it doesn’t take much to ruin everything! To greatly reduce time and costs, many producers today use mechanical harvesting: to do this, however, the plants must be raised in a completely different way, to allow the harvester to operate, giving up traditional pruning and opting for the mechanical one. I have chosen the traditional method that does not mistreat the fruit, giving in only to the use of modern collecting combs, especially the electric ones, which do not produce polluting fumes. These devices are equipped with silicone “fingers”, very soft and delicate like no human hand can be.
Why is harvesting essential? Have you ever wondered why you can find low-priced oils in the supermarket? One of the methods is to simply harvest by falling, that is, by spreading out nets and waiting for them to fall. This way you save a lot, but you get an oil that, by law, is lampante oil, that is, not for food use, but for burning. I don’t even use nets spread out on the ground, on which to drop the olives, but a modern suspended collecting umbrella, so there is no risk of accidentally crushing the fruit and starting the fermentation. The olives, collected in a container, go directly into small perforated boxes and sent to the mill, as established by the DOP specifications : this system guarantees the perfect integrity of the fruit and does not allow time for inadequate fermentation that would develop flavors and odors that would inevitably be transferred to the final product. Furthermore, the olives are separated from leaves and twigs that, if ground together with the fruit, would be the cause of other defects in the oil. But when is the time to harvest the olives? The right moment is when the olives change color, from green to dark, depending on the variety. If you want to obtain a soft-tasting oil, you wait for the percentage of dark color to increase: I usually wait until I see a 60% veraison. If you want a product in which the more herbaceous, bitter and spicy scents prevail, the harvest is done early, at 20-30%. At our latitudes, these conditions occur in December, with adverse weather conditions.
