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Edition 1ge SUN 20
SEP 1998, Page Travel 9
The press gang;Travel;Italy;Tuscany
JONATHAN
FUTRELL
FEATURES
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In Tuscany for the
olive harvest, JONATHAN FUTRELL finds himself led down a
culinary
trail, tracing the finest virgin oil in its progress from branch
to
table
The only picking I like to do on holiday is sand,
from between my toes, on a
beach. In fact, whenever I come across
handwritten signs, always on scrappy
bits of cardboard, by the
roadside, proclaiming "pick-your-own", I
instinctively want to
turn off and shake some sense into the scores of unpaid
pickers
bent double in the field.
If God had intended us to spend our
leisure time on our hands and knees, he
would not have invented
farmers.
But I have come to learn that there is picking, and then
there is picking.
Trying to save a few pence on a punnet of
strawberries on some dreary field in
Kent is one thing, but
chasing the iridescent morning mist from dew-bright
Tuscan
valleys to pick olives that will later be crushed into the finest
extra
virgin oil before your very eyes is altogether
different.
Traditionally, the agritur ismo season in Chianti,
that hilly backwater
between Florence and Siena, and a source of
such joy to so many English
holidaymakers, is over when the last
Range Rover departs north on the
Superstrada del Palio. The
back-to-school exodus begins in the first week of
September and
within a month the region has reverted from Chiantishire to
just
the "yolk of Tuscany" once more.
However, thanks to the
initiative of a handful of "cyber peasants", who are
harnessing
the power of the World Wide Web to locate pilgrims, the
holiday
season in Chianti is being stretched almost to Christmas.
My first contact with
these technofarmers was through a small
organisation calling itself Tutti A
Tavola, which consists of
four women who are successfully teaching tourists to
cook the
Tuscan way. Marisa, Mimma, Lele and Simonetta flex their skills in
the
sort of country kitchens featured in glossy magazines. They
lead their paying
guests, from as far afield as the USA and
Bolivia, on a culinary route from the
market to the kitchen and,
thence, to the table. It was these ladies who said
there are
always afters in Chianti, even when the sun is low in the sky and
the
days are short.
Armed with an e-mail address, I made
contact with Franco Lombardi. He
confirmed that he and his wife,
Lia, have an extremely well-appointed
agriturismo cottage to
rent, close to Radda in Chianti, with olive groves that
would
require harvesting between October and December.
I arrived early
in November, when the verdant hillsides of summer had become
a
carpet of russets, golds and terracottas. With so many hills
there is frequent
precipitation, but after the many autumnal
cloudbursts the sun is actually
keener than at any other time of
the year, casting everything into sharp relief.
Franco and Lia's
farm, Pornanino, is at the end of a long, rutted track
about
three miles due south of Radda. It is approached at the
foot of a valley, with
a line of cypress trees leading up to the
two houses (one for them, and another
for guests), with pasture
to the left leading up the other side of the valley
to the olive
groves. The buildings are restored and immaculate. There
are
gardens and a swimming pool. I selected a bed on a sort of
mezzanine floor,
beneath the roof, and after a meal conjured up
with the provisions provided for
me - bread, cheese, fruit, wine
and olive oil - I turned in.
The next morning started still and
grey, but by the time Franco and I had
arrived at the olive trees
the sun was making its presence felt. In fact, it
had been doing
as much for several weeks. The olives had ripened early
and,
apart from one small section of hillside, the harvest was
complete.
In his dungarees and straw hat, Franco, a six-footer
with boundless
enthusiasm, explained the science of olive
growing: he said that compared with
olive trees in the south of
the country, which may yield 300kg annually, his
produce a meagre
1.5kg each. He explained that, with some exceptions, the
trees
are pruned to produce two central stems, thereby allowing
the maximum amount of
sunlight inside each tree. All extraneous
shoots, polloni (overhanging) and
fittoni (upward), are
continuously removed to encourage more fruit.
Delicate trees
demand great care; no shaking or rattling that could damage
the
branches. Franco placed a net on the ground beneath a tree we
were going to
harvest and, from a burlap bag, produced two things
that looked like red
plastic hands, the sort you find on shop
mannequins. These were pettini and he
showed me how we had to
slowly drag them along the branches causing the olives
to
fall.
Nothing to it, really. With the sun on our backs, we began
the slow and almost
silent process of olive harvesting. When each
tree had been wiped clean, Franco
gathered up the net and poured
the contents into plastic crates. When the
crates were full, we
loaded them into the back of his Land Rover and took them
back
down the valley to his bottling plant.
This turned out to be a
modern, prefabricated building, as clean and scrubbed
as any
hospital. Bottles of creamy green extra virgin olive oil were lined
up
on a long table awaiting shipment, mostly to California and
special customers
in other parts of the world. On one side, trays
of freshly picked olives were
drying, awaiting their moment of
destiny at a pressing plant, and on the other
side of a glass
wall at the back were the stainless-steel storage tanks, and
the
bottling equipment. If there are enough people, Franco holds
olive-oil
tastings here and gives lectures on the efficacy of his
oil.
With so few olives to be harvested, it was agreed that the
next day I would
accompany Mimma, one of the Tutti A Tavola
ladies, on a shopping expedition to
the Saturday market at Greve.
Along with Castellina, Radda and Gaiole, Greve is
a wine town and
the shops that line the ar cades on all three sides of
the
funnel-shaped Piazza Mercatale are brimming with Chianti
Classico.
I have been shopping with expert cooks in southwest
France and Spain, where
most of the money and consideration is
spent on prime cuts of meat. In Chianti,
it could not have been
more different. With the exception of some salami and
prosciutto,
Mimma steered me to the vegetable stalls, where there were tubs
of
porcini mushrooms, baby artichokes, figs and yellow peaches.
Then she bought
goat's cheese and pecorino and
cappuccino-coloured fresh chestnut flour for
castagnaccio - a
sort of Tuscan biscuit/bread made with sultanas, pine nuts
and
olive oil.
"The habit of cooking simple and economic food
has been lost," said Mimma.
"Meat is easy, but we offer cooking
without it, generally. We might make a soup
with chickpeas that
is simple but full of flavour, and pasta with just little
cubes
of meat to flavour it, nothing more.
"We try to underline the
value of fresh things. The choice in summer is
extraordinary. The
huge peppers and aubergines are almost like meat."
While a small
man with a big moustache placed a kilogram of artichokes in
a
bag, Mimma helped herself to some coriander and
rosemary.
"We never pay for herbs in the market," she said. "They
give them to you."
On first meeting, Franco may appear
easy-going, even laid-back. But get him on
to the subject of
olive oil and you sense a passion bordering upon an
obsession.
For him, the key to the finest olive oil is purity. He uses
no
fertiliser or insecticide, he accepts only one pressing of his
olives, and he
has even devised his own vacuum bottling pump so
that his oil does not have to
pass through a conventional
centrifugal pump, which will heat up and may affect
the taste and
texture of his precious oil.
For this reason, Franco eschews the
modern pressing plants located close to
his farm, preferring to
make the long journey to a traditional cold-pressing
plant at
Villa a Sesta, on the southernmost edge of Chianti.
"Neither heat
nor chemicals are used in this process. If the acidic content
of
the oil is less than 1%, then, and only then," he insisted,
"can it be called
extra virgin olive oil. The remaining mulch is
then blended with virgin oil
with a higher acidity to make basic
olive oil."
The pressing plant turned out to be an
unprepossessing building in the centre
of a hamlet. Outside, men,
all of whom knew Franco, loaded our crates of olives
onto a
conveyor belt. Inside, the din was deafening. First our olives
were
crushed beneath large granite wheels and the resulting pulp
(or paste) placed
in a gramolatrice, a sort of giant dough mixer
that kneads the paste and
encourages the micro-drops of oil to
aggregate into larger drops.
"Our oil has to be totally pure, as
nature intends it to be, and we introduce
nothing to change
that," said Franco.
The mulch was spread onto woven mats 4cm
deep, and stacked 2 metres high
inside a hydraulic press, which
was then squeezed at 450 atmospheres. From it
poured a mixture of
oil and the natural vegetable water contained in the
olives.
Finally, the oil and water were divided in a steel drum called
a
separator.
At the other side of the plant, a second conveyor
belt spewed a brown sludge
called sansa. This, explained Franco,
is sold on. It yields more oil when mixed
with a special solvent
and is combined with virgin oil to make basic olive oil.
At the
height of the olive harvest the pressing plant works around the
clock.
Then, Franco may have to remain with his olives throughout
the night to ensure
that the rigorous standards he insists upon
are maintained. But with a Tutti A
Tavola dinner scheduled for
that evening, he left his olives in safe hands and
we returned to
Pornanino to wash and change.
Simonetta had been busy that
afternoon. She had prepared polenta stars,
lasagne, thin slivers
of chicken coated in breadcrumbs, parmesan and finely
chopped
onions, and a semifrozen ice cream cake with sugar, almonds,
fresh
cream and eggs. And in the centre of the table she placed a
bowl of the fresh,
uncooked vegetables and a bottle of Franco's
special reserve extra virgin olive
oil. It was time to dip
in.
If pick-your-own dinners were this good back home, I would
never enter a shop
again.
For details of how to obtain
Franco's oil and/or how to stay on his farm,
contact AZ Agr
Pornanino - 53017 Radda in Chianti Siena; tel 00 39 0-577
738
658; fax 738 794. Or you can e-mail him at
lombardi@chiantinet.it or visit his
website and see images of the
farm and Franco and Lia at www.case-spante.com.
For information
regarding Tutti A Tavola, contact Mimma Ferrando,
Muricciaglia,
1-53017 Radda in Chianti; tel 742 919; fax 742 807.
E-mail
ferrando@chiantinet.it * Jonathan Futrell travelled to
Tuscany, via Milan ,
with Alitalia. There are nine flights from
London daily (seven from Heathrow
and two from London City
Airport). For details, call 0171-602 7111
TRAVEL BRIEF
Getting
there: Airone (0171-434 7321), Alitalia (0171-602 7111),
British
Airways (0345-222111), KLM UK (0990-074074), Go
(0845-6054321) all fly to
Milan. Airone has fares from Pounds 93
return until the end of October.
Alitalia has fares from Pounds
134.30.
The city has two airports; Linate (rather than Malpensa)
is the most
convenient for the drive down to Tuscany, but Pisa
airport is closer still.
Italy Sky Shuttle (0181- 748 1333) has
charters here and Alitalia and British
Airways both offer
scheduled services.
Tour operators: Long Travel (01694-722193)
has a mix of self-catering
accommodation, including some rooms on
agriturismo rural retreats, prices vary
from about Pounds 500.
Vacanze in Italia (01798-869426) has a selection of more
than 180
self-catering farmhouses, villas and apartments in Tuscany and
Umbria;
prices from about Pounds 600 in September. Other
operators with self catering
places in the region include Italian
Chapters (0171-722 0722), Simply Tuscany &
Umbria (0181- 995
8277) and Tuscany Now (0171-272 5469).
Further
information:
agriturismo directories for Tuscany and Umbria,
listing farmhouse holidays,
are available from the Italian State
Tourist Office (0171-408 1254).
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