Vino Bianco and the Olive Harvest

If you have a romanticized idea of harvesting olives in which you go to a mountain overlooking the Mediterranean Sea and spend a weekend picking olives and taking breaks to go photograph a picturesque house in ruins overrun by flowering vines and watch the sun sink into a sea of color illuminating the silhouettes of mountains... keep that idea.  It is entirely correct.

This weekend my friends Angela and Niki accompanied me as I headed back to my Italian home region of Liguria.  We arrived in Genova in the late afternoon and after we got off the train, I realized it was a different station than the one where I wanted to get off.  Not a problem--we just took the opportunity to walk around Genova a little bit more as we wound our way to my relatives apartment.  We had fun meandering and trying genuine Ligurian focaccia, which is different and utterly superior to focaccia from anywhere else.  I had fun playing tour guide and showing off all I knew about the city.  We eventually ended up at the home of my relatives, where Irene was waiting for us with tea, biscuits, sweets, and special breaded olive-meatballs from the south of Italy.  We spent the night in Genova, and in the morning drove to Chiavari, stopping at Boca____ (I can't remember the end of that word--I'll have to ask Irene and get back to you) and Camogli.  At Boca____ we got gelato and climbed to a beautiful lookout point with an almost 270 degree view of the sea.  Best pistachio gelato of my life.  So good I almost capitalized it just now.  At Camogli we walked around, saw the lighthouse and the old cannons in front of Castello Dragono, literally Dragon Castle.  It might have been a surname, but I hope not.  If I owned a castle, I would come up with a kickin' name for it.

We eventually arrived in Chiavari and made our way to the olive grove where Irene's father Franco and her brother-in-law Davide were working.  Had been working, I should say.  It was about 4 in the afternoon and they had been there since early in the morning.  Franco was very happy to see us.  Let me instruct you in the ways of olive picking: you isolate the end of a tree branch, track it to where it forks from a bigger branch, and make a gentle fist as you run your hand down to the tip of the branch, causing the olives to fall to the ground where you have a net set up to catch them.  Then you gather the net, pour the olives into a bucket, reset the net under another tree, and do the same for all the trees.  After that, you empty the buckets into a primitive filtering machine that separates the olives from most of the leaves and twigs you may have inadvertently gathered with the olives.  I don't think there are any other steps between that and taking the olives to the people who have machines to press the olives into oil, but I don't think there are.  The last step, of course, is to enjoy the fresh, high quality olive oil you toiled for.  And that's how it's done, folks.

We only worked for a few hours; at around 7 we had to pack up and call it a day because the sun set and we couldn't work in the darkness.  That night, we had dinner in the home of Irene's cousin Francesca, who was one of the girls I went hiking with in the Alps.  The thing is, I could understand the girls at that dinner better than I can understand anyone in Milan!  I didn't think there was that much of an accent difference, but apparently my unconscious ear is more discerning than I realized.  Interesting.

The next morning we woke up and spent some time seeing Chiavari and eating focaccia on the way to the train station to drop off Niki, who had to get back to Milan to meet up with her visiting parents.  Angela and I met up with Irene and her uncle Vittorio and headed back to the garden to pick more olives.  When we got there, Vittorio broke out the pandolce (sweetbread) and white wine.  It was actually really funny to be caught between Franco the olive harvesting machine and Vittorio, who loved to invite people to take breaks.  Vittorio wanted us to try the wine and the bread, and sit and talk, and take a picture together, and happily enjoy each other's company while not picking olives.  Funny stuff.  Two different, fun, mutually exclusive ways to spend a weekend.  Vittorio actually had to leave before too long, which was when we started to get most of the work done.  We finished working a little earlier than Saturday because Franco and Davide had not gone to mass that day and they had to catch the 6:30 service.  Angela and I caught a ride back to Genova with Irene and caught the train from there back to Milan.

A lovely weekend--you should try it sometime.