This year’s Tuscan olive harvest is in full swing.
From the orchard where Roger is helping with the harvest, there is a spectacular view of the historic abbey of Santa Anna in Comprena…the setting where the 1996 Oscar-winning movie The English Patient was filmed. (The abbey holds an interesting footnote in art history, but that’s a story for another day.)
It’s been an unusually dry year, so the question was, how good would this year’s harvest be?
For a primer on the local olive oil industry, see our blog post https://rbergson.org/olive-oil/
For a look at how the olive harvest can vary from year-to-year, see https://rbergson.org/after-the-pestilence/
Last year was a bad year for olive oil. Four days’ work harvesting produced only seven liters of oil.
This year was much better. This photo shows the yield from the first tree.
We harvested 800 kg of olives this year (1,800 lbs)…enough to produce a total of 130 liters of oil. (In case you don’t want to do the math, that’s almost 20 times as much as the year before).
But just as rewarding as the size of the harvest was seeing the sun set at the end of each workday over Santa Anna in Comprena.