The Crush

Crushing the fruit is the second phase of the harvest. Various wineries and olive mills provide this service, and for a small fee, you can turn your olives into the freshest olive oil available! You can also find olive mills that still use stones to grind the olives versus a crusher.

After three days of collecting olives, we hauled them to the Mazzola Winery and the olive crusher.

The crusher, Mazzola, is a small winery about two miles from me in the tiny town of Scapezzano. Manuel Giobbi owns it, and with his partner Ilka Ilieva, they built an award-winning winery.

Other people were waiting their turn. It's a bit of community time. One very old woman and her son had olives with zero leaves or stems. I was impressed and asked how they got their olives so clean?! Well, they blow them with a blower. Interesting. We do our best to remove branches and leave, but cleaning out all the leaves is unnecessary because the machinery handles that job. No one else had clean olives, but theirs were impressive.

We moved our load to their large crates, filling seven this year! They use a forklift scale to weigh the loads; mine came in at 2048 kilos of olives.

The crush is a fascinating process to me, but then again, I like machinery.

The crushing machinery and hard-working, heavy equipment are impressive to watch. The olives travel up an escalator, down to a conveyor belt for a shower, and finally to the crusher. This powerful machine can squeeze 'Nectar of the Gods' out of a small, solid fruit.

It's not like juicing grapes or apples; there is nothing soft, squishy, or liquidy about raw olives. They're hard as a rock, yet this machine coaxes out the "life-sustaining" oil. And out flows the green oil of the gods. With time, it changes to a rich golden color.

2024 was my most fruitful (ha, ha.) The yield was 220 liters of a bright olive green oil full of flavor. It's fruity, with a peppery bitterness that indicates it's high in polyphenols (antioxidants). My minimum sale was 10 liters, and the largest was 80 liters. After buying some and tasting it, customers asked for more. I sold out in one week.

The oil can't get any fresher and is excellent for dipping crusty bread. Pair it with some balsamic vinegar and a good wine—perfection!

From therapist to olive farmer, who would've thought?!

Please check out videos of the process.

It was a long day. These are hard working men.

And the journey begins.

Up the escalator, into the shower, down the long green crusher, through the filter and into the tin!

And this is where the magic happens. That is a powerful machine.