Photo: This year’s label is a tribute to Jan’s running challenge for Alzheimer’s research. The photo was taken in The Regent’s Park in February during the Beast from the East.
Jan is trying to raise £2,018 during 2018 by running 2,018km. At the time of writing (23rd October 2018) Jan has run over 1,700km. If you would like to help her raise the £2,018 then you can either buy some oil or make a donation here:
“That’s them, they are here already”. It was Sunday the 21st of October. It was just after first light and we were awoken by the sound of tractors in the garden. By the time we got up and peeped out of the window the four man crew of olive harvesters were already hard at work.
This year only about half of our trees had olives. The cold winds from the east in February caused significant damage to many olive trees in the area as the snow turned to ice. Our older trees (200-300 years old) are the Raggiola variety and withstood the cold much better than our younger, Leccino trees. One of them in particular, a young 10 year old, took the brunt of the cold wind and suffered quite badly. The growths on the tree are not disease but the re-action of the tree to the trauma of the ice on it’s branches. It will recover in time, but we probably won’t get many olives on it for a few years.
The guys took just three hours to harvest our olives, all 24 boxes of them. Just as well as soon after they finished it started to rain. I say rain, it absolutely pissed it down. So much so, all harvesting in the area stopped and the olive press, called a frantoio, closed as no one wanted to transport their olives to them in the downpour. It continued all night but at least it stopped before dawn.
We were up before sunrise to accompany our olives to the frantoio at 07:30. As the ground was still so wet no-one was harvesting. Our tractor driver didn’t turn up so our neighbour, Francesco, drove our crop to the frantoio.
The frantoio has installed some brand new kit that displays the name of customer during the de-leafing, cleaning, and pressing process.
Our method of transporting the oil back home is somewhat different from everyone elses. The full one on the left weighed 50kg.
In the absence of a cantina (hopefully we’ll have built one for next year’s harvest, but that’s another, very long, story) we converted our lounge into a cantina for bottling and labelling.
It’s a stunning bright green colour in the sunshine above Cartoceto.
Tuesday was bottling and labelling day. It was such a good harvest we had to wait for the shops to open again in the afternoon to buy more bottles. Three days to complete the entire process of picking, pressing, bottling, labelling and sampling.
2018 Olio Extra Vergine di Casa Angeletti, Cartoceto DOP
- 405.2kg of olives
- 68.8 kg of oil
- 16.98% yield
- 80 litres of oil
A bright green colour that will turn more yellow as the oil ages.
Strong aroma of freshly cut grass.
Viscous in the mouth with a strong peppery after taste.
Use on bruschetta and in salads for the first few months whilst it’s bright green.
As it ages and yellows, use in cooking and salads.
Keep in a cool, dry place, away from from direct sunlight.
Use by May 2020.
Colin and Jan Fisher 