An Olive Picking Holiday

If you have already been on an olive picking holiday you will know how special it is: the friendships, the location, the olive oil (like none you have ever tasted before), the food, the experiences ...

Now is the perfect time to book your holiday with an excellent range of options - a weekend or a week, picking for several days, or just an hour to get a feel of things.  Browse the main www.OlivePicking.com website for ideas, but whatever you do make sure this is on your lifetime 101 list, I personally promise you won't be disappointed. Many of our holidays are offered at excellent rates and by booking now you will benefit from cheap air travel and car hire.

If you aren't sure where to go or which holiday would suit you best please email me on admin@olivepicking.com and I will be happy to help. The main thing is just to DO IT!!

Australian Olives

Early indications are that this is going to be an amazing year for the Australian olive harvest, with yeilds in areas such as western Victoria, up by 50%.  This is due to the wet summer which has left trees laden with ripening olives.  Family owned Toscana will be busy gathering olives from around 28,000 trees.  Their award winning extra virgin olive oil comes from one of Australia's oldest olive groves established in 1943. If you live in Australia you can contact them for a free tasting sample!  Elsewhere you can buy the oil online.  Enjoy!

Pressing the Olives



Pressing oil from the olives the old fashioned way

Thanks to Bob and Ian from Casal Dei Fichi I got the chance to visit their local mill in Mogliano (Corradini Corrado & Co).  Here as well as more modern equipment they still use the old pressing techniques - the stone wheels crush the olives and the paste is then pressed between discs to extract the oil. I came back with fruity, peppery oil pressed from the 'Piantone di Mogliano'.



EVOO or CPEVOOO!

The acronym EVOO stands for extra virgin olive oil but I thought I could go one better with cold pressed, extra virgin, organic olive oil. 

If you go olive picking the chances are that this is what you will be bringing home.  I guess it is then HP (hand picked) CPEVOOO enjoy!

hand picked cold pressed extra virgin olive oil

Remember if you want to arrange your own olive picking experience visit http://www.olivepicking.com/ to find out how.