Click here to go to the home page of Casas de Lorenzo in Montefrio, Granada, Andalucia. Villa and cottage rental, holiday homes in Andalucia, rural homes in Granada Province, vacation homes in rural Andalusia
Visit Lorenzo's website relating his travels in France and richly illustrated with his own photographs. The site includes Lorenzo's pen-and-ink postcards of Paris and Provence. Click on www.french-places.com
What's in an olive?
As you travel along the mountain road, the white village which appears below in the valley, with its towering castle-church, resembles a ship sailing across a rolling sea of bushy, low-lying, gnarled trees... those trees that produce the green gold which all the world desires. Montefrio's olive oil is known for its purity and pungent flavour. In fact, much of the highly reputed and very expensive Italian-brand olive oil which is sold in New York in those pretty golden tins is the product of our groves, cleverly shipped across the Med and packed for re-export by the descendants of Machiavelli.
The main difference between the quality of olive oil and wine is that fermentation improves grape juice but damages olives, which means that the best oil comes from very fresh olives that reach the mill soon after being picked. The oil which is produced by the first pressing is known as virgin, or extra virgin, depending on the quality of its smell and taste. Just go into any coffee shop and order the Andalucian equivalent of a slice of bread and butter, una tostada con aceite, which is a toasted roll over which you generously sprinkle the glorious liquid along with a pinch of salt, and savour it for yourself.
From Roman times up to the first half of the 20th century, olives were crushed between millstones that were turned by hand or dragged by animals. In the 19th century a steam-powered system was invented which began with the crushing of the fruit under three large conical stones, a system which, although now largely superseded, is still used in some mills, powered by electricity. The tip of the cone of each stone was attached to an axle and a complex system of gears rotated the base of the stones so that they rolled over the olives. The system is still used by the Molino de San Cristóbal, and not long ago one was reconstructed to decorate a traffic island in Montefrio, on the northern edge of town.
The juice is then extracted from the crushed olives by means of a vertical press composed of two iron plates at either end of a shaft several meters high. Round straw mats called capachos, woven with a circular hole in the middle, are placed over the shaft one by one, after a layer of crushed olives is poured between them. When pressure is applied on the upper plate, this multiple sandwich is compressed and the oil which oozes out from the mats is collected in a pan below.
Our other mills - Cooperativa de San Francisco and Torre del Sol - use modern Italian-made stainless steel equipment, which crushes the olives between rollers and then separates the resulting mash, diluted with warm water, by centrifugal spinning. The three elements which result from the milling process are oil, fiber (called orujo) and a very bitter substance called alpechin. When foreigners come to Spain for the first time they invariably make the mistake of picking a fat, shiny olive and biting into it, to the delight of the locals, who point the way to the nearest fountain so that the gagging victim can rinse out his mouth. When olives are cured for eating rather than oil, and left in a solution of briny water, this substance is slowly released and rises to the surface, like a black, malodorous scum.
The disposal of the alpechin or, in English, "vegetable water", is a major environmental problem in Spain, not only because it stinks - especially in summer - but because it can pollute groundwater sources. After the oil has been removed from the fibrous orujo, the remaining sawdust-like substance is used for heating fuel and for baking bricks and ceramics, but no one has yet devised an easy and economical way of recycling the unwanted alpechin. The ponds you see in the countryside, full of black liquid (or the dried remains thereof) are where the unwanted substance is dumped. These ponds, or alpechineras, are now supposed to be a minimum distance from inhabited areas, in spite of which one can often smell the ponds in the outskirts of olive-farming villages such as ours.
All oil produced in Montefrio is virgin for the simple reason that we do not have a refinería. The fibrous orujo, or, in English, "pomace", is taken to the big reprocessors in the outskirts of Granada, as you will notice if you are here in wintertime, with trucks leaving the village loaded with what appears to be lumpy wet soil. You can see huge mountains of it in front of the oil factories when you pass by Sierra de Elvira, on the way into town. There, chemical solvents are used to extract all the remaining oil from the fiber.
This "refined" oil, called aceite de orujo or orujillo, is much blander in taste and paler in colour, and of course commands lower prices. If you buy aceite virgen in the grocery stores, you will usually see in the small print that it is in fact virgen blended with aceite de orujo, in the same way that old wines are blended with new. But ours is guaranteed 100% virgin - in any case, Montefrio has no factory able to chemically process the fiber.
The value of virgin oil is mainly determined by the percentage of acidez, or "acidity", created by oxidation. Olives which have been blown off the tree by wind or picked some days or weeks before milling will have fermented, which causes greater decomposition of the amino acids than in olives which are milled immediately. However, prompt milling is not the only way of preventing spoiling. The proper handling and washing of the olives, and correct cleaning and fumigation of the trees, are also important.
Most of the oil milled in Montefrio has a low "acidity" rate of 0.4%. When the level of acid breakdown in the olives reaching the mill is too high, they must be sent to the refinery, like the residual orujo. That is why each mill is equipped with its own testing lab. The denomination "extra virgin" - in Spanish, virgen extra _ can only be given, by an official taster from the Instituto de la Grasa in Seville, to oil with, as well as low acidity, exceptionally good flavour, colour and smell.
At a typical modern mill, such as the Cooperativa de San Francisco, the process is as follows: the olives are dumped from the truck into a bin, from which they are fed by conveyor belts to machines which remove the leaves and twigs and wash them clean. Then they are crushed and processed, as described above. The extracted oil must stand for several months in huge vats so that any remaining solid particles can sediment to the bottom, before being sold.
It takes roughly 5 kilos of olives to produce a liter of olive oil, depending on the quality and ripeness of the fruit, and the farmers either take away the agreed amount of oil for their own use, or sell the olives to the mill. But since most farmers only require a small amount of oil for their own use, the large part of the total crop is sold for cash. Rising prices on the international market, due to olive oil's high standing with nutritionists, has touched off a real "olive fever", with new trees being planted everywhere, usually in the place of almond trees and cereals. A tree can produce between 50 and 150 kilos of olives, and it takes about 8 years for a new tree to begin bearing fruit.
Many visitors to Spain believe that green olives and black olives are grown on different varieties of tree, but in fact the green ones are unripe olives which are picked early, in October. The picking of green olives for eating purposes is called verdear, or "greening", and, being largely for local consumption, only concerns a tiny percentage of the total production. In Spain, the custom is to use green olives for eating and black ones for oil only. The fruit, therefore, is left to ripen and turn black, until late November or early December when it can be picked for milling.
The harvesters work in teams - cuadrillas - of four or five; the men use long sticks to beat the branches - varear - and the women spread huge nets - mantas (once made of canvas, nowadays of nylon mesh) under the tree and gather the olives which fall into it. Since the terrain is mountainous, the edges of the lower part of the net are propped up with stakes, to prevent the olives from bouncing downhill.But the windfalls must be picked off the ground by hand first, which means that more women are needed when the winter has been stormy than when all the fruit has stayed on the branches. This is why, when the winter has been calm, the village women can be heard to lament that "this year they won't have much need of mujeres".
The soil of the olive groves is tilled constantly and herbicide is used to prevent grass from taking hold, because the farmers believe that this aerates the roots and encourages permeation of rainfall. The environmentalists, for their part, complain that, due to wind erosion, it is adding to the desertification process which is overcoming much of Spain, apart from being agriculturally useless. I am not a technical expert, but when I was in Extremadura I noticed that the olive groves were also used for growing grapes on the ground between the trees, which was not only beautiful to behold but not, as far as I know, detrimental to the total yield.
Since the heavily ploughed surface is rough, a few months before the olives are ripe (when they are most likely to fall) a circular space under the tree is smoothed with rakes, or by a battery of truck tires dragged by a tractor, to make it easier to collect them manually. This is called hacer el suelo _ "preparing the ground", and is the reason for the peculiar beach-like appearance of the land under the trees.
After the harvest, the trees are pruned of all the older branches because they are less productive, a job which is an art in itself. In Spain, the olive trees are not allowed to grow to more than 3 or 4 meters in height. The trunks are constantly cut down to just above ground level, to allow new branches to sprout from them, so that although some of the trees may be centuries old, their branches are always new. The current trend is to tear up the very old trees and replant with saplings, because young trees produce more fruit.
The olive harvest usually provides between two and three months of work each winter for people who normally do not earn wages (such as students and housewives) and for the seasonal workers who are home from the beach resorts. There is, also, increasing use of mechanical devices which shake the trees and suck up the olives like vacuum cleaners, and labour imported from North Africa.
The pickers, according to their agreement with the farmer, can work by the day - jornada - or for a percentage of the value of the olives when weighed in at the mill. Another popular system is to agree on a flat price for picking an entire grove, called ajustado. The farmers vie for the fastest workers, and the rest usually find work in other parts of the region, such as the provinces of Cordoba and Jaen, where they live in sheds or old cortijos.
Like any other collective activity in Andalucia, the picking evolves in a convivial atmosphere with a culture of its own. When the weather turns nasty in wintertime, at 900 meters above sea level, working from dawn to lunch (three o'clock) in the mud and wind can be arduous, and to make their lot more bearable the fun-loving Andalucians have developed a curious tradition of chatting and joking which is much less spontaneous than one might think. So much that some of the more loquacious and entertaining individuals are especially sought after when the teams are recruited, because they keep spirits up and make the work go faster.
xx
