Harvest is a big time of the year and truly a whole-family effort.
We harvest for quality & peak polyphenol concentration, ahead of when most producers pick for higher yield — from 30-year-old trees on our single-estate riverside grove.
Why We Pick Green
We pick our olives green, unripe and semi ripe and it costs us dearly in yield but makes an exceptional product.
A green olive is a stubborn thing. The fruit is hard, the flesh grips the stone, and it gives up far less oil than a soft black olive would. Wait another six weeks and the same trees could yield close to double.
We do not wait. Green fruit is where the polyphenols live, those naturally occurring antioxidants that give fresh oil its grassy nose and that peppery catch at the back of your throat. Let the fruit ripen and the yield climbs while the antioxidants fall away.
So every season we take the smaller harvest and the bigger flavour. It is the single decision that defines Olive Gold.
All our Kalamatas were black when harvested. They are black even when unripe and early.
Harvest Days
Early mornings involve the mechanical harvester going tree by tree, row by row while all hands are on deck simultaneously handpicking as a family. There is cleaning out of MOO (Matter Other than Olives - leaves & branches) from the bins, the tractor moving bins & the hauling of them to the mill as quick as possible every day.
The harvester, and every hand we could find.
We aim to harvest as the mill opens for the season, allowing our olives to be processed immediately rather than waiting in line. This commitment to freshness is one of the many ways we protect the quality & character of our oil, we try to minimise any oxidation that starts the moment fruit is harvested. The quicker it is processed, the better.
The olives are sorted by a conveyor belt machine to remove leaves, twigs & debris. The olive fruit is then washed, crushed & processed through centrifugal separation to extract the oil. This is all done without heat, the cold-extraction process preserves both flavour & the polyphenol content our lab results confirm.
The following weekends, we continue hand harvesting selected olives for our traditional brining process — a slower craft that requires patience, care & attention to detail.
Many Hands
Harvest are the days of the year when everybody comes.
There are nets, rakes, many buckets and lots of laughs. Grandparents, friends who are family and four small farmhands are underfoot, bringing far more enthusiasm than technique. Somebody is always missing a glove. There's lots of tea and lots of home baked goodies.
Harvest photos featuring three generations are those we cherish. This is a family farm in the most literal sense, and the week the fruit comes off is when you can see it.
What we will always show you
Single origin means one grove. Single estate means one family. Limited batch means when it is gone, it is gone until next May. If any of that ever changes, you will read it here first.
