The hills are olive (page 2)
I HAVE BEEN READING Mort Rosenblum's Olives: The Life and
Lore of a Noble Fruit. This is now my bible. The honouring of conquering
gladiators; the ritual burial of golden olive carvings with
Egyptian Pharaohs; the stark beauty of the olive bough with its
silver-green leaves.
Rosenblum writes of the caillet roux variety, hanging in
thick bunches, "red as cherries, until ready for picking.”
Picholines - such a merry and mischievous name - are tiny French olives, much prized and picked green. I think they must
dance off the tree, with a name like that.
The kalamata, that's an olive I know. And the fat Spanish
olives I throw into a chicken casserole. I know that when buying
olive oil, "extra-virgin” and "cold-pressed” are words to look
for. This is the sum total of my olive knowledge.
The learning road is long, for Rosenblum informs that
Olea europaea comes in at least 700 cultivated varieties. And
the oil! "'Italian' oil ranges from syrupy yellow southern oils to
this green Tuscan crus with a 'peppery' (that can mean bitter)
afterbite that may last through a long siesta,” writes Rosenblum.
"In an hour's drive, you can go from the sweet, buttery oils of
Liguria, past the green and fruity Luccas, to the sharp elixirs
of high Chianti.”
The train sighs to brief stops. Alviano. Orvieto. I am headed to
Chiusi and from there, by car, to Montepulciano. Pamela Sheldon
Johns - Pa-MEL-a, as the Italians pronounce it - a gourmand
and cookbook author from Santa Barbara, California, purchased
a Tuscan villa nearby early in 2001. She has christened it Poggio
Etrusco and, from there, runs cooking classes and cooking tours,
and for just one week in November, she harvests the olives from
the 1,000 trees in her olive grove. La raccolta, the harvest.
The days leading up to this moment have brought with
them their anxieties. "I have been fretting about the weather,”
Johns writes early in the month to the group of travellers who
will gather for this purpose. "We had a too warm winter, a too
early spring, near-drought/hot weather in the summer … this
year, the harvests have been early.”
Now, though, the olives are ready, the greens and reds of their
skins turning to shiny black. Conventionally, Johns harvests her
olives before they complete this transformation, ensuring that
peppery back-of-the-palate Tuscan taste.
"I've been hoping for cool weather and no wind so the olives
don't get too mature while I make them wait,” continues Johns.
"I've been tempted to go out with thread and tie them on.” Just
kidding, she says.
As my taxi approaches Montepulciano, it passes two elderly
gentlemen in caps and woollen scarves, feet planted in place as
they pluck the olives from a roadside tree. The tree is perhaps
three metres tall. Its branches are full with olives and decorated
with leaves that are not green and not quite gray, but a greenish
silvery grey, as if they have donated all their lustre, all their
richness, to the olives themselves. There must be a word for that.
Renoir and Van Gogh struggled with their painterly renderings
of the great trees and their great fruit. Van Gogh, casting
his eyes upon them, said the green of the trees appeared "saddened
with grey.”
IT IS MORNING. The day is cool, the sky is blue, and the air
is full of fragrance. The lemon tree at the foot of the stairs
leading to my villa bedroom has not yet been brought indoors
for the winter, and I find on each ascent and descent the perfume
of the blooms knocks me sideways, as if this were a
Tuscan summer with the fields awash in poppies.
A cock is crowing - no kidding. A dog is barking somewhere
in the distance. Now and then, the crack of a hunter's rifle
splits the air: pheasant, pigeon, thrush are in season.
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