More on olive oil. . . fresh olio nuovo

On the kitchen porch we’re happily tasting the fresh, new extra-virgin olive oil that arrived this week direct from Cortona.

Teverina, olio nuovo, raccolta 2023

The trees in our oliveto have finally come into maturity, just as was predicted by all the olive oil gurus I consulted when I planted them 25 years ago. Back then, 2023 seemed a long way off in the distant future. Realistically, I wasn’t at all certain I would live to see the olive trees grow to fullness. But here I am, enjoying the fruits of my labor, even though this year’s labor was carried on by my daughter and friends. They pressed a record, more than 100 liters of superb oil, at the Landi frantoio, the olive mill we use just north of our town.

Olives, mostly leccino, at frantoio Land

Tasting it, thinking about it, I find this year’s oil to be notably softer and sweeter than last year’s, but still with that residual bitterness and back-of-the-throat pungency that indicates plenty of valuable polyphenols. Lush and fragrant, it’s full of distinctively fruity, green almond flavors.

Why these particular characteristics? I don’t know. Perhaps if I’d been on site from the earliest days in April when the flower buds began to swell, then followed their development through a rainy spring and an excessively hot summer, if I’d watched as the flowers dropped, leaving tiny green beads that grew and expanded into berries, if I’d witnessed those green berries darkening gradually and evolving into a stage called invaiatura in Italian (meaning when the final streaks of ripeness are beginning to show), if I’d been there for all of that, I might be able to tell you why our oil tastes the way it does. But maybe not, too, because it takes a very attentive farmer and very long experience to understand all that.

We were especially thankful for a good harvest because many of our friends and neighbors suffered this year from the excessive heat that gripped all of Europe throughout the summer. Olive trees have evolved over the past 10,000 or more years to thrive in a Mediterranean climate, cool, rainy winters and hot, dry summers, but last summer was exceptional and it does not bode well for what lies ahead. Have we wreaked so much damage on our poor planet that our grandchildren will read texts like this and wonder what on earth (!) we’re talking about? Unhappily, that may be the future.

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