Day 7- Olives, oil and much much talk of italy!

If you've ever been to southern Italy, especially the east part of Italy where we live you might have noticed that outside of the towns there are fields and fields of olive trees stretching as far ( and I mean as FAR) as the eye can see. Well the months October to January are olive harvesting months… yay!!! So some of our friends from the next town over have found this great family owned olive press, and on Sunday they were having a small harvest festival. So like total Americans who have to get to everywhere on time we showed up about 2 hours before the actual festivities started, but we got a special tour of the oil pressing process , from the son of owner who told us all about his philosophy of life… very insightful!

Here’s all the olives piled together ready to be de-leafed

This is the de-leafing machine, kinda hard to see the leaves flying out, but they're there.

Pile of leaves!!!

Crushed pits! This place uses all of the olive!

While we were having the tour there was the most beautiful sunset!

Ok I know what this looks like but I swear this is a pile of left over’s (pulp, skin, residue and

so on).

Ok it was pretty dark, and it turns out our camera is really sucky at night but this was a truck that drove by us during the tour and dumped a whole pile of freshley picked olives- the smell was amazing!

Then we went inside to see the great big olive crushing stones!

This is how it works, you add the olives

grind them up real good

so it looks like guacamole!

then turn them into  even finer mush.

There are some more steps but practically this is what comes out, this is virgin olive oil, which means that it is pure olive juice and what we tried was the youngest one!

Here's dad trying to taste it without havin his throat burn, he takes his work so seriously!

We were also shown some of the Puglian ( region of Italy where we live) wine and got to celebrate with some Nocino which is a nut liquor, not as good as lemoncino in my view but definitely hardy!

For the fest the news was there and they wanted to interview the non-Italian visitors ( so I promptly ran away as fast as I could) instead our brave friend Amory went and did the interview in Italian, she's was so cool about the whole thing, I thought she did Great!!!