We bill our Umbria Food & Wine tours as an opportunity to spend harvest time in Umbria. And these weeks in October are truly the heart of harvest time in this area. Grapes have usually just been picked and are fermenting in tanks in cantinas, tractors and combines move from one plot of land to another at all hours of the day and into the night. And the first olio novello is being pressed in mills in this olive crazy region.

And oh, that first olio. Olio novello is not so much new oil as it is a different type of oil. For every oil when it first emerges from the press is new oil, whether the olives were harvested in October or in December. But oil made from olives harvested at the very beginning of the season, around this time, is a special gift. Ripe olives but ones that have not matured as their later season counterparts are more bitter, fruitier and yield an oil that is fresher. That is the essence of olio novello.

And oh, that color. When you stand in the frantoio when olio novello is being pressed your nose is bombarded for sure with the pungent aromas of bitter polyphenols, but it is your eyes that are truly captivated. At the end of the line of equipment that separates the fruit from the leaves and stems, that washes the olives, that crushes and mixes the paste, that separates the paste into oil, water and solids, at the end of all this modern, complex machinery is a simple stainless steel spout. And from that spout emerges a stream of fresh olive oil, oil that had been trapped within the tiny bitter fruit just a half hour earlier. And when it is olio novello the color of that stream is not so much green as it is electric fluorescent green. The color of radioactive rods that Homer Simpson picks up with tongs and then his hands during the opening credits. And while Homer is fond of saying “mmmm, beer,” it is impossible not to see this bright green river of nature’s most important and delicious fat and not say “mmmmmm, olive oil.”

Our visit yesterday was to the Antico Frantoio Trampolini, an oil mill that has been operated by the Trampolini family since the 1700s. But here the Knights Templar first started making olive oil as far back as the 1300s. The ancient machinery has been replaced with modern equipment that maintains the tradition of producing extravirgin olive oil by the only means permitted – mechanical crushing of the fruit at cold temperatures (cold is relative term when referring to cold pressed – it really means that no heat can be added and that the temperature may not exceed a specific temperature that is a little higher than room temperature). Despite the conveyors, the augurs, the centrifuges, the high pressure pumps, the process is little different than that employed by the Templars seven hundred years ago. Olives are crushed and the paste is worked to coax oil droplets to form and those droplets are bottled.

Harvest time this year, as has become an alarmingly common trend, is taking place later than the traditional early October date. Nonetheless, Trampolini was pressing olives when we visited, allowing us to see the equipment in action. And, in another common trend, our group found itself congregating not at the front of the line, where the olives are washed, or the middle, where they are ground into paste, but at the end of the line, where the liquid gold (green) pours from the spigot. And there our host filled a clear glass bottle of the morning’s fresh olio novello and escorted us to the tasting room.

His son was waiting for us in front of a stone fireplace and while we watched an instructional video he toasted slabs of bread in the fire, slathering the warm, charred toast with pools of novello. Plates of bruschettas were passed to all and distracted us from the video, the narration drowned out by the noise of crunching, lip smacking and grunts of pleasure.

Harvest time in Umbria is truly a special time. And being able to enjoy a bruschetta with olio novello is about as special as it gets.

Ci vediamo!
Bill and Suzy