Apulia and the Olive Harvest

Come November my wife and I make our way down from the Upper Rhine to the heel of Italy. It’s not especially easy to get from central Europe to the basso Salento—the stiletto of the large southernmost province known as Apulia or Puglia—at this time of year: Air Berlin offers a once-weekly flight to Brindisi from Munich, and if you forget to book it there’s the long-distance bus to Lecce, although the journey takes an entire day. But I have to say that for four years in a row we’ve managed to fly south in November, and even though last year I had to make an emergency visit to my mother in Scotland, my wife kept the tradition going on her own.

Our reason for visiting Apulia out of season, aside from the fact that November still offers pleasant days and a temperature around twenty degrees, is straightforward enough. This is our annual working holiday: we go to help with the Mediterranean’s major winter harvest: olives. Our host is Anna, formidable Italian mother-in-law of my German brother-in-law. (That makes my bond with her somewhat tenuous but Anna treats me just like family.) She migrated to Germany in the 1950s, when jobs were scarce in Italy, married a taciturn Rhinelander called Hermann, and had five children with him in the Allgäu, where they settled. Twenty years ago, with their scanty savings, they bought a ruined masseria, one of those ancient fortified homesteads studded across the region, between Presicce and Santa Maria di Leuca, Italy’s finis terrae, and did it up over a decade.

Anna is the kind of person John Berger wrote about in his trilogy Into Their Labours—a refugee from one of Europe’s dying villages. She is the salt of the earth, and knows a lot about its savour too. I’ve learned many kitchen skills from her, not least how to make pasta from fine durum flour, and methods of preserving garden vegetables, from zucchini to pepperoni. Her five children were brought up on a shoestring budget; she sewed clothes for them and made money on the side with hand-painted porcelain dolls which she used to sell on the local market in their town in the Allgäu. She has never entirely mastered German—and it can be a strain to sit with her sometimes, hanging on her every word in order to tune into her Italian way with those unmanageable northern consonantal clusters (she pronounces tiptop “tip-peti-top” and I only surmised from the context that the knobbly word “ge-kno-be-lo” was her domestication of the German word Knoblauch, garlic). It didn’t stop her minding all her children through school and into good jobs. And though she likes to read detective novels in the evenings in the only room of the masseria heated by a log fire, very little of Anna’s vast fund of practical knowledge comes from books.

Given her lifelong socialist sympathies, it’s perhaps surprising that she’s even a modest castellana. In earlier times, the ground floor of a masseria would be tenanted by farmers and servants, and the upper level opened up in the summer for the visiting families from the big towns. While it may be a big house its fittings are spartan. The thick stone walls make it distinctly chilly on a November night, although the garden still offers figs and pomegranates, and the ridge of Indian fig cacti separating it from the small olive plantation of 220 trees flash their bulbous clown’s-nose fruits or fichidinia. Anna is able to turn these into a sorbet and impresses me even more by discovering edibles everywhere she goes: rucola, fennel, wild asparagus spears.

This unmanicured region is a part of the country visited by Italians themselves, if not at this time of year: Montale’s famous poem about the brass-band playing “God Save the King” on the strand at Eastbourne may not be so much about the British at the beach, but an Italian edge-of-land mood projected onto the English coast. Holidays are pitiless, runs one line of the poem, which is a grim thought for bank-holiday England, but it might fit a November among some of the older olive groves in Apulia. I took scores of photographs of the extraordinary anthropomorphic shapes of the trees as they agonised behind the dry-stone tufa walls. Olive trees live for many hundreds of years, and can survive burning and other acts of wanton destruction. The French illustrator Gustave Doré was fascinated by them, and used them as models for the images of hell in his famous illustrations to The Divine Comedy. His instincts weren’t misplaced; the founders of all three monotheisms were awed by the olive tree and its singular produce. “Christos”, after all, means the “anointed one”—anointed, that is, with olive oil.

If you stand on the flat roof of Anna’s masseria, you can just see the hard glitter of the Ionian Sea at the edge of the flat landscape. Not far away on the other side is the rockier Adriatic coast leading up to Otranto, the ancient promontorium Iapygium which figures in Greek as much as Italian history. The masseria itself sits four-square in a green sea: of olive canopies, in all directions. Only a few Aleppo or parasol pines stand out among their squat and serried ranks, along with the conical trulli—Apulia’s version of the bothy. In any direction there’s barely a sound except for the odd stray dog or distant car, or the radio playing on a tractor, and at weekends the occasional crump of a rifle as a hunter tries to catch a bird on the wing. The plastic cartridges of the hunters litter the paths; and it can feel distinctly unsafe to go for a constitutional when they’re out in number on a Saturday or Sunday. But every hand is needed for picking, and entire families congregate in some of the groves; time is of the essence, since the olives have to be harvested at the turning point known as invaiatura and taken to the mill for cold pressing before they start to ferment.

Olives aren’t so much picked (which would be a truly Sisyphean task) as combed or shaken out of the trees. Broad diaphanous nets are spread out on the ground, and the branches given a good carding; they can be pruned too as the olives fall. Many farmers use machines, which do a brutally efficient job of shaking out the olives along with a good deal of leaves and extraneous debris. Doing it by hand is hard work, but there is a genuine sense of accomplishment when the mass of greenish-purple olives is carted away to be weighed prior to pressing. All of this has to be done within a matter of hours, in order to avoid oxidation; the oil is milled out by a simple hydraulic or centrifugal device in a process that is more like squeezing juice from fruit than extracting vegetable oils from seeds or drupes. Hermann and Anna have never treated their olives, and their oil is premium-quality organic. A tonne of fruit will produce about 200 litres.

Italy has long been famous for the quality of its olive oil, although the stuff has been adulterated further back in antiquity than anyone can remember: the great physician Galen comments on the practice as long ago as the second century. Tom Mueller’s book Extra Virginity investigates the turbid goings-on behind a product that is trafficked globally: like drugs, but with fewer risks. Until 2001, European law made it permissible for any oil bottled in Italy to be sold as “Italian olive oil”, and various conglomerates have made fortunes by commanding premium prices for supposedly pure oils that were cut with inferior products from elsewhere in the Mediterranean (Spain is by far the world’s biggest producer of olive oil). Although there are some 5000 mills in Italy, distribution is dominated by a few big companies. Italy still sells three times more oil than it produces. And you certainly get the impression, walking down to the Ionian Sea, that there must be a lot more to this oil business than meets the eye. Scraggy young trees have been planted too close together ever to allow them to mature or be worked on. Hectare after hectare stands empty of machine or person. “EU subsidies,” Anna mutters darkly. The landowners get funds from Brussels to plant the trees, and the more trees the larger the subsidy; but it’s clear enough that when they were planted nobody ever intended to harvest them.

Industrial production methods and adulteration are a problem for people trying to sell the genuine extra-vergine oil. At the local co-operative mill in Presicce, you can stand and watch the entire pressing process: the mechanical cold crushing and malaxing in drums that allow the oil droplets to agglomerate and separate from the wet pulp. (The residue or pomace will be taken to other mills to be heated and chemically treated with solvents in order to win inferior-grade oil for industrial applications.) In a few days, the entire harvest will have been processed. Oil has to meet exacting organoleptic criteria if it is to be labelled as extra-vergine, a classification which allows only a very low acidity—acidity being a measure of decomposition. In fact, extra-virgin oil isn’t smooth and gentle, but robust and peppery. It has a phenolic “green bite” that can make you cough, although you would hardly know it from the way it is marketed. That is the second adulteration—of taste.

Last year was a good year for Anna and Hermann: they had a yield of about 700 litres. This year is uncertain. Unpredictable and irregular harvests have to be accepted if you farm organically: sometimes there are no olives at all if conditions aren’t right in the spring. And then there’s the continual logistical challenge of shifting the oil by road in the back of the family van, a couple of hundred litres at a time, over a thousand kilometres to the north. It seems to me that we, as guest pickers, reap the major benefit of all this communal effort; we return home with a couple of ten-litre alembics as a reward for our contribution to th

e harvest. That keeps us in olive oil for the year. And of course there’s also the satisfaction of knowing that our own efforts have helped to produce what we consume. It’s a simple but subtle pleasure, and one not without appeal in an age in which production and consumption are almost entirely uncoupled. Ivan Illich would have recognised (and commended) olive-picking as a “convivial” activity, and therefore meaningful in itself. Besides, we’re a bit cannier these days. Mueller suggests in his book that most of the cheap olive oil bought in supermarkets today would have been regarded by the Romans as fit merely to be burned in their lamps.