Green Gold

Giovanni and his family are still picking olives. This is what it's all about. Extra virgin, low acid, herby, grassy, spicey. It's green because of polyphenols, antioxidants you only get by picking early by hand and milling immediately.

The spicy kick you get in the back of the throat is from the polyphenols, too. If a bottle says Tuscan and it doesn't have that kick, you have to wonder where it's from or how old it is. Because of it, one way people around here characterize their new oil is on the "cougher" scale. When I tasted my friend Roberto's new oil, he was pleased. "That's a 3-cougher," he grinned.

Picking early means yields are low, so we only get a liter or two per tree on average, 15-18% of the olive's weight in oil. 400 kilos yields about 60 liters of oil. It's a lot of work and despite prices in the states, there's no money in it at this scale at this end of the pipeline. It's a labor of love. If you're ever lucky enough to get a bottle of our oil, please store it carefully out of heat and light and use it up within 6-months for best taste.

After visiting the Montisi olive festival, I treated myself to the confluence of my four favorite flavors from my favorite season: new oil, new wine (the original beaujolais nouveau), cinta senese proscuito (like Spanish pata negra), and a fresh white truffle (second to none). What could be better on a sunny Sunday afternoon?

Oil!

The kind you catch in nets. Olive oil. Green gold Homer called it. I get excited by it. Most people do around here.

One of the main rationales I had for buying my property is that it came with almost a hundred living oil wells. Few plants give so much and demand so little. Each tree is like a person with it's own shape and demeanor. With their drab green leaves and silvered undersides on twisted trunks and gnarly branches, nothing is prettier in the light and wind. Few things possess more individual character, yet each is a clone-of-a-clone-of-a-clone from a single ancient ancestor.

In 1985, just as the world was discovering the high quality of Tuscan olive oil, a killing frost wiped out most of the olive trees in Tuscany. But a small area around Montalcino and Montisi was spared. My 90-year-old trees, with their perfect southwestern exposure, are survivors of that frost. Old villagers like to remind me of this when they stop by.

A few days ago, just as the olive season was getting underway, Talini, the beloved village miller, had a stroke. He is not expected to regain consciousness. Now, at the time of year his frantoio (oil mill) usually ran until midnight, it is quiet. In a place where fewer young people care to carry on the traditions, another artisan, another living library of knowhow, tales and wisdom is being razed by time and age.

Two autumns ago, just after Sally and I bought the property, Talini gave me the first taste of my own just pressed oil. He got real joy out of my reaction. Now I have oil fever. I owe it partly to him.

Raking Lite

This little rake is about as technical as it olive harvesting gets around here. There is no better way to deliver unbruised fruit to the olive press, the kind that makes Tuscan oil famously flavorful. It is quiet pleasant work. The swish of the gloved fingers and rastrelini (little rakes), the banter, the birdsong.I stopped by to help (from right to left) Giovanni, Arnaldo and Melina Mangiavacchi harvest their olives today. This is what one does here. When you see someone you know up in a tree, you stop and you pick. And you talk. And you tell jokes. And you get introduced to numerous other people who stop by to pick and talk and joke. Tuscan networking at it's finest.

This is particularly important picking and talking because the Festival of the New Olive Oil will be celebrated this weekend in our village of Montisi. Stay tuned!

Raking Light

Yesterday, I learned this is the best kind of light for, well, raking.

After 3 days of intense rain, the weather broke to gorgeous autumn weather and everyone converged on the property to get the water system, roads, excavating, etc. almost almost done. Quasi finito as they say. It was a big, big day.

While I stained the upstairs cement floors with my secret non-acid-wash recipes (to be revealed in another blog): Cesare and two other electricians installed the 3 water system pumps: household, cistern, and waste water purifier (Yes, we will reuse every drop.); Alvaro, the excavator, fixed most of the road damaged by cement and delivery trucks, and sculpted most of the scarpata (the hill of spoil that had to be removed to plant our house in its hillside); and father and son carpenter team, Ierio and Roberto Perugini delivered the persiennes (louvered shutters ubiquitous to this area) which they and the Brandinis will install tomorrow!

But perhaps the biggest event of the day was seeing the Brandini’s tear down the orange security fence. It was a little like ripping open a birthday gift. After one year and one month, the cantiere, the worksite, is now officially open. And just in time for our IKEA kitchen to be delivered and installed on Wednesday.

Which brings me back to that certain cant of light. Because of all the mud I don't want IKEA to track in on my newly stained and sealed floors, I began spreading clean sand around the entrances where sticky fango (mud) would get tracked in from the newly leveled “front yard.” Then I realized that because the clay was soft and pliable and not yet packed and baked hard by the sun, it would be much easier to do whatever grading and leveling I needed to do RIGHT NOW, TODAY! So, as everyone else was finishing their day, I raked the whole thing out. As you can see from the first shot, by bringing everything into relief the contrasting low-angle light of the late day sun really helped me get it level and smooth.

And speaking of relief: I didn’t realize I'd forgotten all about my leg until I was pulling into the drive at Villore, well past sundown. There is no euphoria like that which floods you when chronic pain abates.

I used the banged up rusty rake head I brought over in my suitcase. It's nothing special, I've just had it for 30 years and 3 gardens. Note the nuts, bolts, screws and baling wire needed to attached it to an Italian handle after it broke. Very contadino.

Maybe it's me, or maybe it's Tuscany, but I think just mending a broken rake handle, and then using it, can be a soulful enterprise.

Tomorrow: IKEA!

Calabrone! [Or: Toxic in Tuscany, Part II]

Ammazzacavalli, horse killers, that's what they call them in Tuscany. People not allergic have died from their stings. They are big. And they're just behind vipers on the venom index.

Being built mostly of brick, stone and clay tile, few Tuscan buildings actually burn, so the local fire department is even better known for something else: when you’ve got a calabrone nest in your chimney, that's who you call.

Because it’s steep, Sally calls our property "Stairmaster." Because our olives are near the top, my leg insists I have to wait till next year to make oil. Because of this summer's record heat, Giovanni’s trees yielded half what they ordinarily would, so I gave him our trees to harvest as well. He’ll get a full quota and maybe we’ll get a few liters of oil.

When he went up to our grove for a preliminary check, Giovanni saw them in the boca, the hollow bole of one tree. I knew exactly what boca he was referring to. On my personal pain index, right behind getting "messengered" and "tracked," is calabrone sting.

Once, while picking blackberries in the Pacific Northwest, I bumped face first into an American bald-faced hornet’s nest. I thought I'd been shotgunned in the face. That was nothing next to a single Italian hornet.

Just after buying the property a year ago, I was clearing suckers and weeds from the bases of the trees to prepare for harvest when something the size of a hummingbird slammed into the side of my head and latched onto my ear--the queen matron of the hive I hadn't noticed on the other side of the trunk. In a furious fuzzy frenzy, that honey-colored flying hypodermic repeatedly injected the side of my face with so much venom I couldn't see, I couldn't think. It was like the dentist had administered way too much novacaine, but with the opposite effect. Time became an amber I was stuck in. It seemed to take forever to get down the hill and drive to Villore to press an ice tray against my head.

My ear swelled like some kind of mushroom and rang for 2 days. The side of my head burned intensely for a week. The next weekend I sat 30 feet away from that nest until well past sundown on a half-moon night, waiting for the air traffic to die down. Then I hit that boca with a wasp fogger.

It didn’t work. The next day during harvest we gave the tree a wide berth.

Giovanni insists the answer is to throw gasoline into the hole. But only first thing in the morning on a cold day. I haven't mustered up the courage yet.

Molta Terra

A warm siroc out of Africa has brought rain in the night. This is why for the last 3 days, Giovanni and his son Arnaldo have done nothing but disc and harrow and seed the wheat fields with grano, winter wheat. They like to sow just before it rains to help the seeds germinate, and so crows and ants won’t steal them.

What you can’t tell from this picture of Giovanni about to do just that, is just how cold it is from the Siberian blast we got beforehand.

The soil is so poor here that they have to plow as much as two feet deep in some places. In English, to my mind at least, this is why toil rhymes with soil.

[earth by Sally]

How I Broke my Leg: Part II -- "Tracked"

It was a near death experience, that explosive impact and resultant dynamic headstand. I could have so easily broken my neck. Or ruptured something vital in my head. Or gone into a concussion induced coma. Lack of medical care at St. Vincent’s notwithstanding, I survived my date with the Messenger of Boom.

Afterwards, I walked around the city for 3 days, dazed and amazed that I was alive. But I had to knuckle down and meet a deadline. Which I did. Once I had the staples removed from my scalp, I could return to Italy to finish healing and to stain and seal the cement floor the Brandini’s helped me pour.

This is Russell & Eileen, the friends who’ve given me and Sally refuge so many times at their beautifully restored farmhouse, Villore. Without their friendship and generosity, I would not be doing this blog. More about this later.

No sooner had I landed in Italy, when I was hit with more work. Thankful, given the economic freakout I was undergoing along with everyone else in the world, I buckled down. 2 weeks later, exactly one month from embracing the messenger, I went on a bike ride with my friend Russell Wilkinson. Below is the long and short of what I wrote to a few friends that evening.

Beautiful, hot, Sunday morning in Tuscany. Terriers coasting down from Montalcino on bikes. Jack leads peloton. Russell right behind. They are pushing an easy 18 mph when, crossing diagonal railroad track, a freak of track grabs Jack's rear wheel. Jack goes down on left hip and shoulder. Splat. Russell runs over Jack's right calf and goes down. Splat. Great embarrassment all around. Jack scoots off road on butt, Russ gets up and straightens handlebars. Jack uses signal crossing light to stand up. Russ helps him back on bike. Jack and Russell ride 10 more miles, mostly uphill, to car. Back at Villore, ice and ibuprofen. Jack determines leg is broken, fibula, but not tibia (at least not bad). In case of multiple fracture, and to keep tightening muscles from forcing fracture out of alignment, he performs yoga stretches for the achilles tendon and the hamstrings of increasingly tender leg. This actually feels good. Painful clicking from leg stops, but calf and shin suddenly balloon with swelling. Gardener happens to have a cane handy in garage, so with long-scheduled guests coming for lunch (Dana and Don from Gubbio, Umbria), Jack grills two chickens as planned. Guests arrive and a lovely outdoor meal ensues. After 3 or 4 glasses of wine and a cooling swim in the pool, Jack says "time for hospital." On the way, he and Sally show their nearly completed Tuscan home to Dana and Don who are inspired and full of praise. Adieus. And Sally drives through Montepulciano to Notolla hospital, closest to the new house. Amazingly quick admittance and X-ray take about 10 minutes. Radiologist announces the leg is fine, perfectly straight. But as Sally starts to wheel a very relieved Jack down the hall for ordinary first aid, the radiologist exclaims "Madonna!" Sally goes back. Higher magnification has revealed the bone is broken, a complete fracture, but perfectly set and aligned. Jack is less than relieved, but still happy it isn't worse, not compound, didn't need surgery, hadn't wrecked the bone on 10-mile ride plus barbecue. Off they go for a plaster cast. But first, a nurse comes at his belly with a needle--heparin, they're told, to avoid thrombosis. He blanches. Nurse says he'll need such injections every day for a month, no problem he can do it himself. Jack blanches, Sally recoils. Nurse injects "povero bambino" with sinister-yet-compassionate laugh....

Read the complete story in my upcoming essay, "A Tale of Two Emergency Rooms: On the pleasures of socialized medicine and the need for health care reform in America."

Needless to say, I would not be making wine, I would not be finishing floors, I would not be making olive oil, I would not be living as planned for the next 2 months.