Sorry I have been MIA, it's the harvest, or should I say it was the harvest.
We are done, Nico filtered the oil today, and as we knew by looking at the amount of olives on the trees it was a very low harvest. It is going to be a tough year.
Not only that but people were otherwise engaged in early November and boy have my olive oil sales gone down on Amazon. We are up to 46 reviews on Amazon now, all 5 star reviews save 2, so that should help a lot, once people get back to normal. What I really like is the number of people who are re-ordering.
I only tasted the Bouteillan after it has been filtered. It is hard to gauge the final taste when it comes out of the centrifuge, I can tell pretty much, but the real test is after it has been filtered through sheets of pure pressed cotton. I was REAL happy with the Bouteillan, it is back to it's typical citrus flavor, a little grapefruit/lemon flavor to it, I really like that. Some years it is more "herby" other years just real flowery, and like the Bouteillan we have on Amazon right now, once in a great while you get a banana flavor to it. If you produce an olive oil with a banana flavor that is like an automatic Gold Medal and we did win one for our 2015 Bouteillan. It is very subtle and comes out after you swallow, you wait a few seconds and it comes up at the back of your tongue. The 2016 Bouteillan is a much different flavor than the 2015, it is funny how that Bouteillan varies in flavor year over year. But is is always consistently great.
I couldn't work down in the mill today because Nico was filtering and we would get in each others way, so tomorrow I will clean, thoroughly clean spotless the centrifuge. That is going to take me a few hours. I may clean one of the maloxers as well, but probably I will wait until the next day and do both. Cleaning the maloxers is very hard on my back, I have to bend down and reach in and brush it all clean, it's a real job but it has to be done. You just have to have clean equipment if you want to produce fresh crisp tasting olive oil. If your equipment isn't clean the olive oil comes our with kind of a sour wine flavor or musty, not nice.
In addition to not having many olives the yields were low also. I did okay on yields on our olives, could have been better. Yesterday one of our last customers had an 11% yield. He brought in 213 kilo of olives and only got 23 liters of oil, that is a lot of work to pick 213 kilo of olives, get all the leaves and twigs off, case them up and bring them to the mill and only get a yield of 11%. Last year he got a 16% yield. (My highest yield ever on our olives was 26%) The good news is I beat our local competition for yield, he-he-he. A great mill customer of ours, out of pity took a load over to our neighboring mill (we are friendly competitors we do help each other out) as they were so desperate for olives, they need olive oil to sell. He brought half to us and half to the other mill, I yielded him 15% and the other mill he only got 14%, so I felt pretty good about that. Last year his yields we always right around 20%. I understand why he wants to stay connected to that other mill because the other mill will buy his olive oil on years when he produces a lot, and we won't. We will press it for you but we don't buy olive oil from others, we only sell our own. He has a lot of his own customers but last year he had so much olive oil he ended up selling some of it to the other mill, even though we pressed it.
Tomorrow I will do the accounting, I have not added up how many liters we have this year, plus I will add up how much income we made pressing for others. That also is going to be way way down, nobody's trees had many olives on them. We did make enough to pay our 3 pickers, our nephew and 2 air traffic controllers.
I will post a pic of our grand niece, she came with her mom (our nephews wife) and stayed the week-end. I gave her little jobs to do and she loved it. She's so cute, only 3 years old.
In this first pic she is skimming the olive oil to get the foam off. She was pretty good at that.
She helped her mom pick off the leaves from the first machine. Actually we only ever pick off small twigs, or a twig that has a lot of leaves on it, but Lola did a good job of picking out leaves one by one.
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I had her sweeping the mill, we have one of those what is called Lobby Brooms and Dustpan, the kind with the short broom and the dustpan with the long handle, the broom was kind of hard for her to handle so i went and got her a brush and she cleaned up all the errant leaves from the mill, then to my surprise she kept going and went outside to the front of the mill and swept up leaves from the outside too.
The harvest is over, what we have we have, no sense crying about the low volume, next comes end of year cleaning. Oh, one thing I noticed not one single olive fly worm. Not one from ours and none of our customers had any either. So the low number of olives is not caused by an olive fly attack, nobody knows for sure exactly WHY from time to time we get these low yielding years. It was not the olive fly this year that is for sure, it must have been to hot for them this year.
They may order some of your EVOO.
