A harvest in Tuscany. What images does that conjure? Undulating hills in autumnal sunshine? Happy harvesters with floppy hats and brown faced smiles plucking warm fruit in scented air between laughter filled breaks for alfresco pasta and red wine?
Yup. That’s more or less what I imagined too when I offered to help my friend Kerri Gotto with her Chianti olive harvest.
For years, the voluptuous pea green oil from her hilltop olive grove has given her income a much needed fillip. This year, having spent most of it in pain, Venice and aggressive chemotherapy, she faced the prospect of having to give away her harvest to the estate from whom she rents her beautiful home. And she couldn’t have borne that.
And so we decided, in June, that somehow, some way, we would make the harvest happen.
In July we were going to make a first visit, to check on the trees, the wild boar who came to her garden and her beloved Tuscan house, which had been being reroofed.
I was in London packing when the phone rang.
“Can you drive, darling?” came the Antipodean twang down my Nokia. “I’m paralysed.” Had it been anyone else, one’s thoughts would immediately have turned to disbelief … alcohol … despair …
But with Kerri Gotto you know that no crisis is too much to be turned into part of the marvellous drama that has been her life.
By October she was, contrary to all medical expectation, walking around her Grand Canal apartment in rather fetishistic busta – a surgical corset to support her back. In black, of course. Which, along with Kerri’s way with a silk wrap made it look really rather stylish.
By the beginning of November the harvest plans were back in full swing. I proposed getting a willing group of volunteers together whom Kerri could instruct in the gentle art of olive harvesting, from her position on a hillside chaise longue. It was beginning to sound all very Frances Myles.
So, mid November, after more refusals than a tripe-seller at a vegan convention, enter the cavalry. An enthusiastic group of individuals determined to get those olives in and the oil pressed. Galloping over the hill to save the day.
There were Charles and Linda Gotto, Kerri’s cousins, who have used and sold her oil through their award winning gastropubs in London and now in the Sussex Hills. This year was to be the big launch, both of their new pub The Parrot, and of the Gotto – ‘g’ brand – oil. When they heard that the harvest was in danger of not happening they left the cask beers, the wood-fired warmth and freerange deliciousnesses of The Parrot and came to help make the oil they had planned simply on selling. Eat your heart out Antonio Carluccio. This is dedication to quality product!! Then there were Vicky and Mark – their daughter and her fiancée. Vicky is also in the gastropub business and Mark is a landscaper. There was Adam, Kerri’s son who is in the luxury hotel business. Then there was me. The cavalry! Unfortunately none of us could ride.
Wednesday
Kerri, Adam and I are on the Eurostar to Florence. I have bronchitis and weeping blisters (I’m a stilettos girl and my feet don’t take kindly to their new agricultural-strength Cats). Kerri has just finished her last bout of chemo and looks like a Twiglet in a bodywarmer and woolly hat. Adam reminds us every ten minutes that he is only coming for a day. The Eurostar – along with almost all the trains on the Arrivi board is ominously late and arrives with snow on it.
Later on Wednesday
We arrive in Tuscany, via an Arctic blizzard around Bologna, to leaden skies, empty gas bomboli in the two elderly heaters that stand between us and hypothermia, and four beds between seven. I say seven. It transpires, some hours later, as Adam and I ferry bedding and damp electric blankets in the dark, from the main house to our capanna, that half the cavalry have got lost en route.
When they eventually arrive out of the Stygian dark, we shake hands and lug beds, drink shockingly chilled red from the boot of their car, drive twenty minutes to a pizzeria lit like an interrogation cell to the quite the worst Penne Arrabbiata I have ever eaten, come back and play electrical Russian Roulette with our heated (and gently steaming) beds. I don’t sleep much as my bed seems to have been custom designed for Jeanette Krankie and the Mark the landscaping fiancée snores.
THURSDAY
There is frost on the ground. There was never frost on the ground in Under the Tuscan
Sun, I observe moodily.
I am suddenly glad of my Glaswegian upbringing and its concomitant skill for getting dressed under a duvet. I apply thermal vest, two jumpers, thick trousers, three pairs of socks and a fleece before emerging. I add a duvet coat, woolly hat, gloves and the torturing boots and troop out with the rest to start picking.
The wind could slice salami, so we start round the back of the capanna. We have all, variously, been reassured by people whose knowledge has been painstakingly gathered from television shows called “I Have an Overdraft and No Working Knowledge of Any Language Other Than Impenetrable Regional English So Find Me A Derelict Hovel Somewhere Sunny and Unsuitable and You Can Turn Me Into A Pathetic Figure of Fun on Prime Time TV”, that harvesting olives is simple fun.
The received wisdom amongst those who wouldn’t actually know an olive harvest from a Morris Dance has been “You just shake the tree”. We mention this to Kerri and she hoots. In fact, if laughter is the best medicine then she’ll never need another bout of chemo.
We get a short lesson in separating olive and branch, the offer of a tiny plastic rake and a bucket strapped around our waist, then we pick our ways over the rough ground, the tufty grass and the industrial-strength brambles to choose a tree. My first tree (and I shall always fondly remember it thus) is covered in shiny fat black olives. I take off my gloves and slide my fingers down the drooping branches twizzling and flicking and gently disengaging the olives from their perch. They feel like little satin beads, and the sound they make as they clunk into my red plastic bucket becomes both the soundtrack to and the measurer of my day – hollow clunks when the basket is empty followed by softer and softer pats as the bucket fills. Their music comes in measured quavers of single olives and dramatic trills of demisemiquavers when a whole spray of olives comes off in one long sweep of my increasingly expert fingers. I feel almost like a country girl. I hum.
Then I fall off the precarious pile of stones on which I am standing and sustain really quite impressive bruising to my calf.
My first olive picking injury! I think about taking a photo, but realise I haven’t shaved my legs for three days and have to hope the bruising lasts till I get back. We pick in relative but companiable silence for hours until …
“Lunch?” says someone brightly. “What is there?” There is a short pause. Then Linda disappears off into the kitchen to do something creative with a couple of potatoes some onion and a pot of water. Unfortunately it’s not quite creative enough because it tastes like – well, exactly what it is. Except you couldn’t really taste the potatoes or the onion. But it is hot. We, on the other hand, are positively on fire as we survey the 60 kilos (approx) of olives we have harvested!
The afternoon starts well – as we are all now, as Charles puts it sagely, “wise in the ways of the olive”.
Even Kerri is picking. We take it in turns to warn her against overdoing things but these are her trees and she has loved them and talked to them and harvested from them for ten years. Such is the backbone of this woman – irradiated as it has just been – that she props herself against a trunk and plucks with the rest of us. As the temperature falls like a prematurely exposed soufflé, Adam attempts to cheer us with an olive picking song. It sounds depressingly like something from the first Coldplay album and so does nothing for morale. By five o’clock it is very dark. And very, very cold. We shoo the feral cats out of the stone walled room where our olives are stacked and survey our work.
Around one hundred and twenty kilos of tiny berries of varying greens and blacks and everything in between. Some are smooth, some are like tiny Hass avocados. But they all look good to us.
We run them through our fingers and retire to a delicious stew Linda and I have rustled up from some chicken legs and a surprise package of spicy sausages we found in the fridge. I concoct a sauce from anything edible I could find in the house and the proceeds of a sprint round the herbs in the garden in the dark. This is creative stuff. Like a hardcore version of Ready, Steady, Cook.
It rains that night. Hard.
I have moved from the Jeanette Krankie Memorial Bed to the couch at the top end of the one huge room that is the capanna. And, thanks to a hitherto undiscovered leak in the roof, it rains right into my corner. All night.
FRIDAY
My corner looks like Venice when I awake. It has also rained, it transpires, right into my suitcase. This I discover, plunging my hands into what had been my fresh underwear stash and is now several inches of freezing water. Correction, semi frozen water.
Gloom descends on us frustrated harvesters with the rain. We use our olive buckets to catch the water coming through the roof. We dispatch Adam with a collection of empty gas cylinders to get fresh ones and I wring out my clothes.
We sit around the warmish bit of the room and discuss the noises in the night. ‘Had we heard the eagle owl?’ enquires Kerri. We had all heard the haunting screeching call.
Apparently the Tuscan hills are veritably teeming with wildlife – not just eagle owls but porcupines, badgers, three kinds of deer (one of which doesn’t even have an English translation for its name) and, of course, the wild boar who, as of today, will be dodging dogs and firecrackers and hunters’ guns as the season opens on them.
We look out on the torrential rain. From time to time we hear the screech of the eagle owl again, and marvel at its fortitude, flying through the deluge. Until it gradually becomes apparent that its appearances tend to coincide with the creaky extractor fan in the bathroom switching on. I hastily cancel my text to David Attenborough and concentrate on my now-steaming Tesco Value socks.
It is, we learn from a bout of time-passing texting, snowing in Venice, London and most of Scotland. And Milan. Adam is not terribly bothered. There is one of Italy’s regularly irregular, expectedly unexpected General Strikes today so no one is going anywhere very much. And a crushing hangover has him in its grasp after a late night nightcap with me and the landscaping snorer. I say nightcap. The best part of a bottle of Caol Isla has more of a thick knit balaclava effect, to be fair.
To everyone’s delight it stops raining in the afternoon and we reclaim buckets and rush out, instantly soaking ourselves to the knees but determined to double the stack of olives in our store. Kerri had told us categorically that you must never harvest olives in the rain, or even when they are wet. But then she was the one who’d been waxing lyrical about the eagle owl.
We have been galvanized by the weather (ok, technically inaccurate and therefore a less than helpful metaphor, but you must understand I am in Tuscany-cum-Antarctica and I don’t have an item of dry clothing to my name, some of my favourite body parts have been completely numb since we left Bologna and all in all I am considering suing Frances Mayes for gross misrepresentation. Where was I …). Ah yes, we have been galvanized by the weather into a mean lean picking machine. We recce the grove, targeting high yielding trees, we descend on one like five Carluccio’s on a field of wild mushrooms. Faster than you can say “this is an extraordinary oil, grassy yet peppery and just look at that colour!” we had an old parachute silk around the base, Mark and Charles were up in the branches while Vicky, Linda and I set to the lower clusters with rakes and fingers. Rivulets of freezing water from the leaves course up inside our sleeves, hit the armpit and trickle down our sides. We whimper. A hail of rock hard little green olives batters down on our upturned faces as we rake and twizzle. We wince and squeak. But we harvest on. My warm but only just showerproof duvet coat has absorbed what feels like my own weight in water before we slow down and survey an almost entirely oliveless tree. We gather up the silk with its precious bellyful of olives and decant them into buckets. Up in the stone walled store we spread them on almost anything absorbent we can find and leave them to dry. I envy them as I drip and squelch back down the hill to where Charles and Mark are already spreading white billows around our next tree. By the time darkness wraps the hillside the floor of the storeroom is covered in mattresses, coverlets and towels each laden with olives.
We are elated. Wet and cold and tired. But elated.
And celebrate by going out for one of the finest meals of my life. About half and hour away from our hilltop lies Villa Sesta, where we will bring our olives on Monday to be pressed in the old mill. Behind the mill is the Bottega del Trenta – a little low building, unassuming to a fault. Except that this place has no faults. Plain and homely, warmed by a little woodburning stove and a great big smilingly Tuscan host. The food is the kind you remember all your life, starting with a thimble of the Villa Sesta’s own, newly pressed olive oil. We toast. And drink it. It tastes of grass with a peppery tickle on the end of the swallow. It is flanked by a tiny bruschetta with its own half garlic clove to scrape along its surface. And a liquorice allsort sized square of homemade pate. The chef is beside us now. Helene. She talks us through the possibilities of our meal … to start … an asparagus mousse and something incredible she has created from aubergine and confit tomato … then plump ravioli stuffed with a mix that starred beetroot and which I could have gone on eating forever … except there was the fabulous three hour cooked duck and the deliciously gamey pigeon and the glorious veal before a plate bearing a selection of the most incredibly delicious desserts known to the art and science of the kitchen. I wanted a doggie bag just for the bread Helene bakes fresh each day. It alone is proof that low carb diets are evil and twisted. We drink a magnum of 1993 Palazzino. Served by a sommelier almost as delicious as the wine. But not quite. The Bottega del Trento is worth a trip to Tuscany all on its own. It is an Italian National Treasure.
I hate to brush my teeth when we get back to the capanna.
SATURDAY
More rain. We are losing Adam today – to the bright lights and chic clubs of Milan. So the 80s Puffa Jacket and bobble hat will have to go then. Vicky and Mark are also leaving today – flying back from Pisa tonight. We decide to use our wet hours usefully and set off for the local suppliers of all things useful to the olive harvester. There is something marvellously satisfying about going somewhere like this as someone who is in with the picking in-crowd. We optimistically buy large olive oil containers and several dozen bottles. We wander around and I discuss the harvest with the lady at the till. Not great this year, we agree ruefully. Weather conditions, we nod. She obviously knows someone wise in the ways of the olive when she meets one. We buy real olive pickers’ gloves with a view to getting out among the trees again, and a bottle of rather excellent Vin Santo and some home made cantucci in case we don’t.
Back on our hilltop, we celebrate the deluge dropping down to a drizzle by donning our new gloves and denuding another tree of its fruit.
Unfortunately it doesn’t remain a drizzle for long, but we are out now and we keep picking, having reached and long passed that stage where you simply cannot get any wetter. At around one o’clock we help push Adam’s lift out of the quagmire that is the path to our home and wave goodbye to him through the now almost horizontal rain.
Then we were five. A tree and a half later and Vicky and Mark disappear to pack. And then there were three. We work against a complex tapestry of sound – the soft rhythmic drumming of rain on leaves and shoulders, the swish of rake down frond, the soft pops of olive on silk, our escaping grunts as we stretch for a branch and strain to pull it, pliant but reluctant, down to picking level, the whoosh as it, released, whips back upright and the occasional yelp of pain as whooshing branch accidentally meets harvesting body. From further away there comes the barking of huntsman’s dogs, the banging of dustbin lids as wild boar is flushed out of the undergrowth and the crack of gunfire as they are shot down. Some of the guns begin to sound seriously macho – even for Italy. Except that the sound is thunder. Charles and Linda go to ferry (almost literally, under the circumstances) Vicky and Mark to the airport.
And then there was one. My Scottish Presbyterian working class attraction to martyrdom rears its passive-aggressive head and I work on alone as rain and darkness continue to descend. When I start to harvest leaves because I can no longer tell where the olives are, I surf my moral highground across a sea of puddles to the capanna and drip smug suffering and rain in front of the heater.
“Tea?” I ask Kerri, who is still suffering post-chemo nausea and has been reduced to existing mainly on Dr Scott’s Blackcurrant and Guarana. I go to fill the kettle. I turn the tap. And nothing happens. There is a boom of thunder from behind the next hill. It is suddenly like being trapped in an old horror film. The capanna, it transpires, does not get water direct from the mains. It has a vast cistern dug into the hillside. Which had to be filled up regularly. Which it self-evidently hadn’t been. I clamber back into my coat, grab a torch and set off into rain and the wind and the absolute black of the Tuscan night. I sing. Quite loudly. It always used to work in my childhood when going upstairs in the dark. Well, I was never attacked by a monster then, so it must have. I reach the far side of the garden and scrabble around in the building rubble. I find the square manhole cover, hoist it open and reach down to turn on the water. There are whirring and glugging noises – and they’re not coming from me so I must be doing something right. I replace the manhole cover and go back to the house with an outrageously inflated sense of achievement. I feel like I have diverted a river and created fire. I feel like George Peppard in The A Team when he says “I love it when a plan comes together!” Unfortunately it hasn’t. There is still no water in the capanna. The fuse on the pump must have gone announces Kerri. So I’m off into the rain and the wind and the absolute black of the Tuscan night again. This time to rootle around under the big house to find the pump and its blown fuse. And by the light of my four AAs I do. I flick fuses in a slightly nervous manner, get a green light and saunter back to the capanna with the confidence of a frontierswoman. We have water. And I – albeit totally unfounded – have the greatest sense of personal achievement since Rosa Parks.
I make porcini risotto with some fantastic dried mushrooms I find in the back of a cupboard some elderly brown rice and an assortment of bottle dregs. Rather good, though I say it myself. Linda and Charles are lost again, I assume from Kerri’s end of a phone conversation that begins with the words “Where? How did you get there?”
But they make it back eventually and we eat, we drink, we dip cantucci into Vin Santo and we sleep. A sleep I truly feel I have earned. That is an odd and wonderfully ‘proper’ feeling for me. I like this life. I like it a lot. I especially like it when I am on my couch on my electric blanket and under two duvets. I hear a screech. Maybe it is an eagle owl this time.
SUNDAY
Our last day’s picking. And it dawns dry and sunny!! We are up and out and under an olive tree faster than we can devour a sack of cantucci (and that is fast). We are a real team now. We are now wise in the ways of the wobbly ladder and branch walking, we are become quasi-Tuscan olivisti. We discuss the yield potential of each remaining tree … we guide each other’s rakes, we take turns holding down the branches for each other. It is all going so well I am even taking pictures.
The baskets are piling up in the store room. Even the feral cats are impressed.
We are but a couple of trees away from the 400 kilo mark. We are very, very happy.
And then the skies darken and open. We gaze upwards and feel our faces sting. “That’s sleet” I say. I know about such things now. Sleet it was. For a short while. Then it was snow. We lay the last of our harvest to dry. Stack the crates ready to go to the mill tomorrow. And retire to shower (didn’t I do well!!), pack, tidy and create one last meal from everything edible we have left.
MONDAY
We must be at the old mill for 8am. And we are. It smells delicious. Like generations of olive oil and woodsmoke and country things. Our olives are hoisted up to the first floor weighing machine. Just under 400 kilos. Our crates are stacked just behind those of a man who appears to have been tanned (as in leather, as opposed to St Tropez). I chat to my brogue-faced friend. We discuss the harvest, the quality of olive. We cast knowledgeable eyes over each other’s crop. “Tre persone per tre giornate” I say. He nods.
More harvests arrive and are stacked up. I guard our place in the queue jealously. “Sono la prossima” I declare, in a firm but friendly way to those who wander round in too obviously opportunistic a way. An hour or so later our green and black babies are tipped into a big skip and drop down into a washing and sorting machine. They trundle along from there and end up under two huge stone wheels that roll around like a scale model of that bit near the end of Samson and Delilah, only without Victor Mature distracting attention. They die there, our olives. Crushed to a khaki paste, flesh and little stone hearts and all. The paste is squished (please pay attention, this is technical stuff) out onto flat circular mats which are piled up in layers, like some sort of dull vegan imitation of a mille feuilles. Towers of pasty mats are wheeled over to the standing presses where they finally give up their oily oliveblood. It drips off and fascinates us as we stand beside the two presses marked ‘Gotto’. I could not be more proud. Or more suddenly aware of the incredible value for money that is good olive oil. Oil that is picked in individual olives and pressed in individual drips. And there are a lot of drips from many many olives in a bottle. Around an hour later our oil is released into a little tank for pouring into our shiny steel churns. It is bright green … a sort of limey mushy-pea green. It is thick and it froths and it is so beautiful I want to dive in. It fills all our containers. Our olives give us nearly 80 litres of oil. “Accidente!” says the lady of the mill. We have achieved their record yield – 20.2%. We are heroes.
We are happy. Happy in a way that even the closure of the motorway at Ferrera and the three hour sojourn in the resultant traffic jam could not mar.
I am now back in London. Kerri in Venice. The oil is in Forest Green, in The Parrot. The people I care most about are getting little bottles of it for Christmas. No one will ever have got a present with so much of me in it. A bottle of my (ok, our) oil sits in my kitchen. Every so often I have a teaspoonful of it. It really does taste that good.
You should taste it. Actually you can taste it. Call The Parrott (01306 621 339) and talk to Charles or Linda. They are wise in the ways of the olive, you know.