The Almond Blossom Appreciation Society (22 page)

This sight – so at odds with the beauty of the silvery leaves, the sheep nibbling grass around the ancient trunks – always haunts me a little when we begin the harvest, and each year I find myself starting off by milking the trees for the by now purpley-black fruits. I climb the first tree and run my open fingers down each laden branch to send a shower of olives pattering down onto the nets spread below. There’s a glorious sensuousness to the feel of the perfect little fruit, glistening with oil as they slip through your outspread fingers. The smell, too, of being high in the crown of an olive tree is incomparable. Bernardo across the river says it’s like green tomatoes, and the very essence of olive oil. Then there’s the peace of it, the sound
of the pattering olives, the breeze in the leaves, the
rushing
of the rivers, and you up there dappled with warm winter sunshine.

But Manolo, to whom this sort of thing is typical of the bizarre notions brought by
guiris
, considers my performance with blank incomprehension, and sets to in time-honoured fashion with his
barra
. And before long I am at it, too, whooshing and clacking my cane at the branches. If you milked a tree for oil olives, it would take you the best part of a day to pick just one tree. And, although you might think that a very agreeable way to carry on – being under the impression, as you probably are, that there are no
deadlines
, timetables or stress in the countryside – it’s simply not viable. Once an olive falls, it ceases to be nourished by the tree and the acidity starts to develop, and for the best olive oil you want your acidity to be as low as possible. The ideal is to press your olives within twenty-four hours of picking them, though this is seldom practicable unless you have your own mill. If I were to milk all my trees by hand, the first olives picked would be over a month old, and completely rotten, by the time I’d sacked them up and taken them to the mill.

Time, then, is of the essence for all olive farmers, and with this in mind I try to tempt my friends from the city to come and help with the harvest. For the price of a few bottles of olive oil and a week of good food and wine, I’ve established that you can have a cheap and contented workforce and, if the weather is right, then everybody has a wonderful time.

It’s hard to make a living – or indeed anything at all – out of small-scale agriculture, and olives are no different. When I bought El Valero, however, I was certain that our olive harvest, along with the flock of sheep, would provide the backbone of our fragile economy. It didn’t matter that we had sold our entire first orange crop for a paltry £50; olives would be different.

Unfortunately, the odds were stacked against us. For a start, our olives hardly seemed to be growing. I sought advice, as usual, from Domingo, who assured us that this was no fault of our own – it was simply a
vecería
, that
curious
phenomenon where, every other year, groups of olive trees decide amongst themselves to gather strength for the following year by yielding little or no fruit. That year most of the trees on our farm seemed to have opted out, and of the pitifully few that hadn’t, the bulk of their olives dropped in the winter winds and were wolfed by the sheep. When it came to the reckoning, we had collected barely a couple of hundred kilos to press.

We cast about for someone to mill such a tiny quantity, and were directed to Manolo El Sereno, in a village north of Granada. His
apodo
– Sereno means ‘nightwork’ – refers to the fact that, somewhere back in the last century, he was the lamplighter for his village. He had long retired, though, and was now, as he told us proudly, the owner of the
smallest
olive mill in the world.

Driving up with our sacks, I humped them into his mill, which was set up in a little room next to his bathroom. With a saucepan he ladled the olives, glistening and oily black, into the funnel on top of the mill, and started up the grinder. I jumped back and opened my mouth (which is what you should do to prevent your eardrums splitting
in the event of high-volume sound), for the noise was unbelievable. The grinder is a powerful hammer-mill that graunches up the olives and shatters the stones, preparing the pulp for the pressing.

I stared in open-mouthed stupefaction at the awesome machine with its horrendous roaring, its sound amplified still louder by the tiny tiled room. Manolo, who seemed impervious to the din, busied himself down in a corner of the room, messing about with the arcane paraphernalia of home olive-milling. Then suddenly a tiny gobbet of flying olive mash whizzed past me and spattered on the white tiles. Then another and then some more. Perhaps this was the way the thing worked, but soon my glasses were caked with a thick layer of olive pulp and there were purple splodges all over the gleaming white walls. I backed into a corner, shielding my eyes from the flying sludge. Surely this was not the way it was supposed to be.

‘Ay, Manolo!’ I shouted into the ear-splitting roar. But he didn’t hear me. The grinder raced on. If it carried on at this rate, then the whole of my olive harvest was going to end up on the walls of Manolo’s mill. I ventured from my cover to tap Manolo on the shoulder, but just then a thick lump of flying olive flesh caught him square in the ear.

He looked up in consternation. ‘
Hostia
! – The Host!’ he cried. ‘I’ve left the door open!’ He leapt to the switch and shut the monster down, leaning on the door as it whined slowly to a stop, thick clods of purple sludge oozing round the edges. Then he cleared the muck from round the door, shut it tightly and started the whole process over again.

From the grinder, the
masa
– a thick sludge of olive flesh, skins and shattered stones – was ladled into a great tub to rest before going into the press. Vile brown muck, it looked about as unappetising as a thing can look. There it reposed for a few hours. I got fed up with watching this part of the process, and repaired to a bar in search of faster-moving entertainment. When I returned, the sludge was in the press, a tall steel cylinder with a mesh at the bottom and a spout. From the spout dribbled a thin stream of viscous liquid.

‘This is the first pressing,’ said Manolo. ‘The oil’s coming out under its own weight. This is the extra-double-virgin stuff. I’ll put it in separate bottles for you.’ We watched the oil dribbling out for a bit.

‘How long will it take for it all to come through?’ I asked.

‘I’ll leave it tonight and all day tomorrow, then I’ll let it stand to let the
jamila
settle out. The
jamila
is the water that the olive contains along with the oil. The oil is lighter than the water, so it floats on the top.’

A few days later Manolo rang to say our oil was ready. He had put it in neatly labelled plastic Coca-Cola bottles. I don’t know quite what I expected, but its arrival, and our first tasting, was not as exciting as I’d hoped. I’d never been that sophisticated a connoisseur of oils; indeed, to speak plainly, I’d hardly have known nor cared about the difference between olive and sunflower. These days, I can talk olive oil as passionately as the next man, and can appreciate that at the gastronomic end of the market its production and maintenance is as delicate and complex a matter as that of wine. But back then, one oil seemed much like another to me, and the stuff in the two-litre plastic
Coke bottles, fruit of our first harvest, did little to convince me of any magical properties.

Still, the year after Manolo’s milling, things looked better, as we had been assured they would. In fact, it looked like there was going to be a bumper harvest – far too big for Manolo’s tiny mill to deal with – so we cast around and made
enquiries
about other local mills. The one thing everyone told us was that all commercial millers are thieves, and will stop at nothing to screw you. It seemed that there was no way to avoid this, as all millers are the same, always have been and always will be.

When I pressed Domingo for an explanation, he suggested that millers always had an advantage over their public, as they were cunningly well versed in the ways of counting and weighing, while their customers were often illiterate and unskilled in the finer points of mathematics. When times were hard – which they usually were in rural Spain – it was difficult for the millers, finding themselves in this position of power, not to be corrupted. Something of this proclivity had found its way into the millers’ gene pool, and thus to this day honest millers are scarcer than hen’s teeth. Domingo illustrated his contention with examples of dastardly behaviour. And, as well as cheating their customers, it seemed there wasn’t a miller in the area who hadn’t been fined for adulterating his olive oil with cheap bulk oils.

The thing looked bleak, and we made careful enquiries as to which crook to entrust with our business. Domingo advised – for a ‘cleaner, more honest sort of deceit’, as
he put it – the appealingly named Cuatro Culos, who performed the deceit so neatly and seemingly
ingenuously
that it was almost a pleasure. ‘The good thing about Cuatro Culos’, he told us, ‘is that he admits that he screws everybody. He can’t help it, he says; he was made that way. And he’s a very nice man, generous and charming. If you’re going to get ripped off – and you certainly
are
going to get ripped off – then you might as well be ripped off by
somebody
nice.’

It was a well-marshalled argument, and there was a sense of fun about Cuatro Culos’s very name – which, of course, is really his
apodo
or nickname. It means ‘Four-Bums’ and Domingo explained that it was a nickname passed down, along with the proclivity for deceit, from generation to generation. It has, as have many of the best
apodos
, an appealing ambiguity about it. This particular
apodo
usually indicates the occurrence of gluttony somewhere in the family history, but it could also be taken to mean someone who is capable of crapping on you in a big way. Either
interpretation
could be suitable for a miller, of course.

We chewed over all this, and I was on the point of
driving
off to be fleeced by Señor Culos when, for some reason I can no longer recall, I plumped instead for Miguel Muñoz of Las Barreras, a miller with a reputation for utter and shameless venality.

The crop that year was as good as any I have harvested: over two thousand kilos, beaten and plucked from the trees by a band of pickers that included a Swedish professor of Cultural Anthropology, a marine biologist and a teacher of
comparative religions. We stuffed the crop into old
sheep-feed
sacks and stacked them under cover from the rain that by good fortune started to fall just as we finished the harvest. I rang the mill to ask when I could bring them in. ‘I can’t possibly do them this week,’ said the miller. ‘I’m stuffed up solid with a backlog. Bring them in next Tuesday.’

The rain stopped and the temperature rose a little and the week ran its course. On the Tuesday morning I rose before dawn in order to be the first man at the mill and avoid the rush. I heaved the sacks into the trailer and headed across the valley for town; I had a niggling sense, throughout the journey, that I might have trodden in some dog shit.