Rancho Azul y Oro ~ Surviving the Dream

The adventures that continue to occur at the rancho boggle one's mind.  Keep in mind the romantic image that is continually in this hopeless romantic ranch manager's head of one day establishing a vineyard, strolling down the rows of the perfect, beautifully purple grapes, while holding a glass full of our favorite wine, all the while, incredible food from this very rancho is awaiting on the patio, perhaps a dish of home-grown, marinated olives, perhaps some grilled garlic bread drizzled with our own olive oil, perhaps some melted goat cheese drizzled with jams made from figs and peppers grown at this very farm.  We are inching ever closer, but there is always that frequent hair-raising incident that nearly causes one to get in the car, drive away, and never come back. Last week, in preparing for the 2011 harvest of the newbie Petite Sirah (which we should never do, yes, yes, it has been noted, but it was too tempting), we decided to take that stroll through the vineyard at s...

We thought it would never happen, but finally -- finally -- the picking, crushing and pressing of the 2010 crop of olives has occurred. Harvest of everything that grows is done. Over. And while it would have been nice two months ago so that all those rainstorms could have been enjoyed in front of a roaring fire with a good glass of wine, rather than out in the cold drizzle picking olives, in the end, it is finally the end. And now that it is the end, that means it is also the beginning. 2011 was launched with the pruning and retying of all those vines while simultaneously pressing the last of the 2010 olives. The Pest Control Manager, the Carl Spackler-wannabe, has been out in force, planning on new ways to get the upper hand on everything that dares to vex him -- gophers, squirrels, mice, rats, voles -- please note, this author is not included on that list. The olive trees have also all been pruned and are ready to go for 2011. The Picking and Pressing Team were getting a little ...

I've been mulling over what can be said about our first experience picking and pressing our olives. One always reads travelogues in which happy people are picking olives on sunny days in the Italian countryside, followed by a crush, and entire towns celebrating with a feast, in order to dip crusty bread in the olio nuovo, browsing from table to table to share every family's personal oil. To begin our saga on a positive note, we learned a lot -- always important. In hindsight, we now know our day was too ambitious. There were only two pickers and two trees, which yielded 40 quarts of olives, which took five hours to pick, bringing us to 4:30-ish in the afternoon, and it was getting dark. The average citizen might have called it a day at that point, gone in, warmed up by the fire with a glass of wine. Of course, we are not your average citizens. We were driven by a belief that we would just crush these olives, and in a few short hours, be sitting at the bar in our processin...