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Harvest Time!
You will have read the short version in our note. Here is the fuller picture, with photographs from the groves this month.
The harvest began on the 31st of August. It is the only thing happening here now. We start at dawn and finish when it is dark, and everything that is not picking or extracting has been put aside until the last grove is in.
Sea, then inland, then mountain
We do not harvest by field or by convenience. We harvest by altitude.
The groves closest to the sea came first. They sit low and warm, and their fruit develops ahead of everything else we farm. From there we work inland. We will finish high in the mountains, where the same trees, the same varieties, the same farming, run well behind the coast.
Altitude changes everything about the timing. Cooler nights and a later season mean mountain fruit reaches a given stage long after coastal fruit has passed it. If we picked every grove on one date, we would be picking three different stages of fruit and blending the results together.
Working from the sea upward means each grove is picked at the same point in its own development. What goes into extraction is consistent, so what comes out is consistent.
Every olive is green
Not turning. Not spotted. No ripeness at all.
This is the decision that shapes everything else, and it costs us real volume.
An olive continues to make oil well past the stage we pick at. Harvesting green means a large part of that oil is never made by the tree at all. It is not oil we leave on the branch for someone else. It is oil that does not exist yet and never will, because we picked before the tree produced it.
What we get in exchange is concentration. Phenolic content is set early in the season, around the time the pit hardens, and it begins to fall away as the fruit matures. A grower who waits gets more litres of a weaker oil. We take fewer litres of what we came for.
Low yield, high phenols. Every September we pay for that trade again, and every year we would make the same choice.
By hand, into the cold
The fruit is picked by hand with combs.
Combs take olives off the branch without tearing the wood and without bruising the fruit. A bruised olive begins degrading before it ever reaches extraction, and no amount of care downstream repairs it.
Picked olives go into shallow crates. The shallowness matters more than it sounds. In a deep crate the weight of the fruit above crushes the fruit below, and heat builds in the middle of the load where nobody can see it happening.
Within minutes the crates are inside a refrigerated truck at 4 degrees. We run two trucks and two teams, harvesting at the same time in different groves, so that no crate ever sits in the September sun waiting for transport.
From the moment an olive leaves the tree it is racing its own enzymes. Cold slows the race down. Everything we do between the branch and extraction exists for that one reason.
Extraction, several times a day, without oxygen
We do not gather the day's fruit and process it in one run at the end of the day. We extract several times a day, as the crates come in.
The extraction runs cold and oxygen free, in a proprietary system of our own design. The details of that system are ours and we keep them so. What it is for is simple enough to say out loud: heat and oxygen are what take phenols apart, and our process is built to keep the oil away from both.
It more expensive. It is more work. It is the whole difference.
The oil is then held cold, and stays cold with us until the day an order is dispatched.
Why the cold chain is the point
Most olive oil, including "high polyphenol" olive oil, takes a punishing route to your home.
It is bottled at ambient temperature, held in a warehouse, shipped across an ocean in a container, and then stood on a lit shelf for months. Phenols do not survive that neutrally. As a general rule, an unopened bottle at room temperature can lose a substantial share of its phenolic content across a year, and European law permits a shelf life of eighteen months.
Then the bottle is opened, and the decline accelerates. Every pour lets in more air, and the oil sits with that air until the next one. A bottle opened in January is a different oil by March.
We keep ours cold from the moment the fruit leaves the tree until the moment your order leaves us. And it does not go into a bottle. It goes into sealed single doses, one day at a time, so nothing is opened until you open it, and what you open is finished the same day.
Held cold and unopened, phenolic content is far more stable than most people assume. That is the reason for the entire design: to lose as little as possible between the tree and you.
The first oil
The first oil came out of extraction on the 31st of August.
We are not publishing a figure yet, and we will not until the harvest is complete. The analysis is done once, at the end, when every litre has been made. A sample taken this week would describe the first days of a harvest that runs across several groves and several altitudes. That is not the number anyone should be quoting, including us.
What we can say is that it is very potent, and that the fruit has behaved the way a year of work suggested it would.
What happens next
When the last grove is in, the oil goes to the laboratory. Every number from this harvest, measured independently, published in full before any of it is sold. We do that every year, whatever the numbers say.
Then it is packed, and then the shop opens. It does not go on general sale. It opens by password, and our letters carry the password.
People ask us when. The honest answer is that we do not decide. We work with nature and we cannot hurry it. The fruit comes in when it is ready, the oil is finished when it is finished, and we would rather do each step properly than quickly.
If you write to us during these weeks we may be slow to answer. We are in the groves from first light until dark. We do read everything, and we do come back to you.
Everything there is to have this year is already on the trees.
Nick and Nicolas
