Tourist Olives
Paying too much in Sicily
I wrote a couple of weeks ago about a really neat visit in Sicily to an olive oil producer/bottler. The facility we visited was just for storage and bottling, but they grew and pressed their own olives, out in the countryside.
It wasn’t really a public-facing place, but if you called, you could schedule a quick tasting and buy some olive oil. Which we did, and it was one of the best experiences of the trip.
But I thought a visit to an actual olive oil farm would be cool, and we found one outside Siracusa, a little bit of a detour from our drive to Ragusa. The place grew and processed olives on site and sold the oil there too—several different varieties, unlike the one (very good) variety from the smaller producer we visited. The reviews were glowing. So I booked two $40 olive oil tour tickets (and skipped the $30 lemon orchard add-on). At that price, it must be great, right?
Heh.
Look, I don’t want to be hard on a small business that invites people into its facilities to see processes that most customers never see. But $40 was quite steep for the experience, especially for Sicily, where prices overall are fairly low. $40 is almost Napa Valley winery prices. There’s a pretty fine line between “That was very nice but a little expensive” and “$40 for that?”
And all the travel literature says Sicily is less touristed than the rest of Italy. I don’t know about that; it wasn’t too hard to get ripped off there. It’s interesting how even a relatively low level of tourism changes a place.
I’d also read about how olive oil producers are turning to tourism amid poor harvests. So maybe that explained the very high price? But nope—the tour guide/owner told us that her farm had enjoyed a particularly strong harvest this year!
First impressions. For some reason, the power to the main building was shut off when we arrived, which meant I had to use the men’s room in the dark. The owner explained that it had something to do with the utility company. I didn’t quite catch it, but it was one of those moments in Europe when I felt thankful for my nice air-conditioned car, big appliances, and, for the most part, absence of worry over things like power outages. (I think I could get used to the somewhat reduced material standard of living in Europe, but for the duration of a normal vacation, I don’t.)
I had assumed we’d go out into an olive grove and maybe see some of the equipment involved in harvesting. Instead, we never strayed 100 feet from the main building. The olive tree part of the tour was a 15- or 20-minute talk under a few olive trees off the driveway, while we sat on some lawn chairs.
But the centuries-old olive trees were pretty cool!
This farm uses hand harvesting and basic tools, if I recall, but some larger farms use fully mechanized methods. The more work that goes into the process, the better, and more expensive, the final product.
After the standing-under-a-few-trees portion of the tour, we moved over to the outside of the production building, where there was a pile of olive pulp and ground-up pits—pomace—which go to producers of olive pomace oil. That’s a chemically extracted vegetable oil that uses the leftovers from extra-virgin olive oil production. It’s cooking oil derived from olives, not what you’d call olive oil.
Then the explanation of the production process. It’s quite a bit like wine, actually. First the olives are tumbled to separate leaves and twigs and other debris, then they’re rinsed and pulled inside the production facility for crushing. Here’s the sorting/washing machinery:
Here are the crushers. The olives aren’t “squeezed,” per se. During and after crushing, the oil separates from a lesser amount of watery olive juice.
Here are the tanks, which also look like a winery!
I guess I know all of this, roughly, but it is very cool to see it and have it explained.
One really interesting thing stood out to me. The owner said that people with small olive groves will bring in their olives during the harvest, and the facility will crush them. In other words, the infrastructure exists here in Sicily for a property owner with a few olive trees to have fresh extra-virgin olive oil pressed out of their own olives for some small fee.
This touches on this issue of “scale” that I’m always writing about. There’s a whole way of life in that little business transaction. In at least one place in California, this exists too.
Here’s one more machinery shot:
And some little snacks along with our olive oil tasting! Needless to say, the olives were very good.
The tasting was very nice. In addition to the little sides, there was bread, of course, and after pouring a small tasting of each variety of olive oil (four or five) the owner left the bottles on the table, so we could try them all again and dip the bread in as much olive oil as we wanted.
Now, my wife and I didn’t actually love the olive oil. It was very good. But Sicilian olive oil is pretty mild—some tasting notes identify it as rich or buttery—and if we’re going to get fancy with olive oil, we like the ones with grassy/peppery/fresh/bitter notes. But those are variety and climate factors, not necessarily indicators of quality.
At the end, we bought the obligatory, pretty large bottle for about $20—a very good price for oil of this quality, grown and pressed on site just a few weeks ago.
But you know, I’d probably take four bottles of olive oil over two $40 tours.
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