Olive oil, liquid gold

After the apparently poor olive harvest, our neighbour mentioned bringing some oil as per our agreement but never did. Last night I phoned and asked about it.

Our share of the yield from our grove

He replied that the yield barely covered the expense of picking, that there’d been so many ‘quintali’ of olives yielding so many kilos of oil (he lost me here), that he’d spent a fortune on diesel coming and going, that he wouldn’t have enough oil to last the year, etc, etc, and therefore he wouldn’t be giving us any.

He came today and did in fact bring us 2 litres of oil in an old wine bottle, but he was still grumbling about diesel, and time spent pruning, and did I say diesel? (He takes a short cut across someone else’s land to come to our olive grove; it’s no distance at all!)

I reminded him our arrangement wasn’t that he had all of the oil, and suggested that in future he shouldn’t start picking if he thought the crop was so poor it wasn’t worth it.

We’re a bit dubious about the provenance of the oil he gave us. How clean was the bottle, for example? We normally get a sealed metal can straight from the press.

We’ll certainly have uses for it, though.