Olives and Olive Oil

by SCMG Steven Hightower

Imagine these vignettes—

 

A guest goes wild over the pungent, fruity olive oil on the bruschetta you serve as a little pre-lunch nibbly. You humbly inform him that it comes from your own trees, locally pressed and milled.

You arrive at a dinner party, among a passel of other guests carrying flowers, or some bottle of wine or other, but you’re a standout when you present your hostess with a green-gold bottle of estate extra-virgin oil with your own label.

On a cool, but bright and sunny fall day a group of old friends drifts in mid-morning, to spend two or three hours lazily stripping green and black olives from pendulous tree branches into buckets worn like front-facing backpacks. Laughter, jokes, breaks for a sip or two of chilled Rosé wine punctuate the work. At one pm or so, with the bins full and ready for the press the next day, you all sit down at a long trellis table in the olive grove for a very European-style harvest lunch of salume, crusty bread, crisp salad and baked pasta—all washed down with lovely wines from your cellar. And a couple of months later, you distribute elegant, tall, bottles of that charming green-gold liquid to them as an eagerly awaited annual thank-you.

These, then, are some of the benefits of being a small, non-commercial olive grower. There are more and more of us around the County. Olives are known as Sonoma’s ‘other’ crop. To be sure, there are plenty of artisanal commercial producers, who want to make a living from olives and oil—but there’s an Italian saying that you plant grapes for your children; you plant olives for your grandchildren. There’s much truth in that when it comes to making money from the crop. But for the olive producer who just wants oil for home use, and for special gifts, and perhaps their own home-cured olives, the path can be much shorter.

A dozen years ago, my neighbor, Ed Stolman, and I attended an olive-growing seminar given at the Healdsburg ranch of Ridgely Evers, one of the pioneers of the fine olive oil industry in California. Ed, in his inimitable, larger-than-life way, imported 1600 trees from Italy and plunged into the for-profit artisanal oil business. After a couple-year delay, I bought 50 trees that were being taken out by Dutton Ranch in favor of grapes, and began the slow year-by-year process of obtaining a yield sufficient for home use and those hostess gifts.

So what might you expect, if you took the plunge with a few or a dozen trees? Newly planted trees, two-three years old from the nursery, will start to bear fruit as early as their third or fourth year after planting—although not in significant quantity. By our fourth year (seven-eight year old trees) we were getting enough for all of our use—we never buy oil at the store—and to reward our picking crew, and provide dinner gifts for the year. By now, our 12th year, our yield is normally is more than all those requirements, and we eagerly present olive oil gifts to acquaintances as well as friends. 

So let’s suppose this sounds attractive to you. How do you start? How do you decide where to plant the trees; what varieties; how many and what spacing. And how do you know how much work you’re letting yourself in for?

Here is a summary of those factors, and at the end of the article, links to more extensive articles by Master Gardener and olive cultivation consultant Alexandra Devarenne, and Farm Advisor Paul Vossen.

Location

There are only two key requirements: lots of sun and reasonably well-drained soil. Olives thrive in poor or rocky soil—they grow out of the rocks in the wild in Europe—but detest wet feet. Too-wet soil is the biggest cause in the County of poor crops, weak growth and flat-out failure. If all you have is clay—like my side of Sonoma Mountain—you must plant in mounds or berms. Olives have quite small root-balls, and will survive happily for many years in such small envelopes.

Varieties

The olive variety or varieties you choose depends on what flavor profile you want in your

oil, and the degree of difficulty of maintenance, and especially, picking that you’ll tolerate. In recent years the four main Italian varieties—frantoio, leccino, pendolino, and moraiolo—have been very popular. These produce fruity, peppery, very forward oil. Spanish arbequina and French picholine have also been popular for their fruity, aromatic style with a softer and more buttery finish.
Sevillano is a great blending olive, but it’s very high pit-to-fruit ratio makes it impractical as a standalone. Picual, Coratina, Koroneiki and Hojiblanca are all varieties that are being increasingly grown.

A blend may well be your best bet. A look at this table should make it clear that olive oil, like wine, may benefit from blending to combine complimentary qualities.

Arbequina: Recognized for its aromatic ripe fruitiness, low bitterness, pungency, and stability
Coratina: Strongly green herbaceous, bitter, pungent, and stable
Frantoio: Very fruity, aromatic, herbaceous; medium bitterness and stability; strongly pungent
Hojiblanca: Fruity, aromatic, mildly pungent, low bitterness and stability
Koroneiki: Strongly fruity, herbaceous, and very stable; mild bitterness and pungency
Leccino: Medium fruitiness, and stability; low bitterness and pungency
Manzanillo: Fruity, aromatic and herbaceous; medium bitterness and stability; strongly pungent
Moraiolo: Very strongly fruity, herbaceous, and stable; medium bitterness and pungency
Picual: When harvested early produces a nicely aromatic fruity oil that has medium bitterness and very high stability.
Picholine: Very fruity and aromatic; medium fruitiness, bitterness, and pungency
Extracted from VARIETY AND MATURITY INFLUENCES ON OLIVE OIL by Paul Vossen

Our local pressing syndicate of five growers has a combination of the Italian varieties, Spanish Manzanillo and Arbequina with a bit of Picholine thrown in, and we get a fruity, aromatic, pungent oil that in our annual tastings shows up very well against expensive artisanal oils like McEvoy, Da Vero and Lunigiana.   

A factor not to miss in selection is ease of picking. Smaller olives that don’t cluster much, such as Arbequina, Frantoio, and Pendolino, take much longer to pick than, say, Manzanillo or Hojiblanca, whose larger fruit tend to cluster along the branches making it easy to ‘milk’ them down into picking baskets by the dozens.

Cultivation

It may seem contradictory, but olives actually take quite a bit of water. Young trees benefit greatly from regular deep watering. A drip system is best, held high on the trunks, much like drip in vineyards, to provide for easy mowing and weeding. And weeding is important! According to studies done by Paul Vossen, Sonoma County Farm Advisor, weed competition within three feet of the trunk has a significant negative effect on foliar growth in young trees. As far as feeding, an application of nitrogen twice a year should be sufficient. Feeding after maturity can change to every other year—olives are alternate bearing, and to try and combat that, some growers feed in ‘off’ years, and withhold in ‘on’ years. As always, mulching will both conserve water, and discourage weed growth. Pruning is discouraged in early years, and in more mature trees, there are various methods and theories—there are articles and books available. The olive fruit fly has become an entrenched pest that must be dealt with, but there are now traps that are simply hung in the trees in June as a highly effective method of control.

Harvest and Milling

Harvest is exactly as described in the opening of this article. If you don’t have enough friends who find the annual picking morning and lunch a great party, it only takes a few hired laborers a few hours to pick a home orchard. A part of the fun is milling day—the day after harvest. There are three olive mills in Sonoma County—the Olive Press at Jacuzzi Winery near the bottom of the Sonoma Valley, the Dry Creek Olive Company west of Healdsburg, and Figone Oil Company in Kenwood. Whichever you choose, on pressing morning you’ll deliver your olives, and then watch them go up the conveyor belt, through the washer, and down into the mill to become a mash. Over a couple hours that mash is thoroughly mixed, then sent through a two-stage centrifuge to separate out the solid matter and water. With eager anticipation you finally watch that liquid green-gold pour out of the pipe at the end into your barrels or carboys as you inhale the pungent, heady aroma of fresh, extra virgin olive oil—your own.  What instant gratification. Bring bread.

For more information refer to

Planting Olive Trees - DeVarenne by Olive consultant Alexandra DeVarenne

Paul Vossen and UCCE pieces on:

Planting

Pruning

Fertilizing

Variety influence

Olive maturity calculator.