Rancho Azul y Oro ~ Surviving the Dream

  Apologize for the hiatus!  As with everyone, some time was taken to bask in the warmth of the summer sun, roast a few marshmallows, go to the fair, watch a few sunsets, and walk barefoot through the grass (only in our minds, otherwise, the rattlesnakes could end the summer quickly).    What's been going on at the rancho, you might ask?  Lots, as always.  The table grapes ripened nicely and surprised us with much more bounty than expected!  The fig tree has produced a serious crop of figs this year.  We're currently producing fig jam, strawberry fig jam -- basically, anything one can think of utilizing figs, as well as our highly anticipated Tequila Jalepeno Grape Jelly and our Ruby Royale Grape Jelly.  Our current cocktail accompaniment is a olive/fig tampenade, with the ranch olive oil, naturally!   It was been a sizzling summer here on the Central Coast, with temperatures over 110 since mid-May through the end of July....

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 ...

Yes, we're always ready to learn, but 2010 seemed to be a year of an awful lot of lessons. In fact, we just can't seem to let go of 2010, we're still picking olives. Still . . . picking . . . olives. First, they wouldn't ripen. Then, they all started ripening, but the weather wouldn't cooperate in order for us to pick them. Now, they're ripe and we're trying to get them picked, washed, sorted, crushed, maxalated, and pressed, in addition to gearing up for the 2011 things we need to be doing, like pruning the vines, which we did get done last weekend, except for three rows of Zin, which we'll finish with the last olive trees. I had originally estimated seven gallons of oil for the year. However, because I was such a newbie back then (and so much younger), I didn't know we'd lose a gallon or two due to the new mats. And yes, that's one of the valuable lessons -- never get new mats. We will, however, be ending the year with five to s...

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...

It seems like it was a year spent waiting. Spring and bud break seemed like it would never come. Summer seemed to come in starts and stops. We waited all year for a heat that really only materialized on occasions when we wished not to have to deal with wilting heat; the rest of the summer was 26% below our normal temperatures. We waited for ripening of the grapes. We waited and waited. Finally, with the olive harvest upon us, we could not wait any longer. The Zinfandel was harvested October 4. The brix sneaked up on us and came in at an astounding 28.5, a whopping 17.8% alcohol. It is destined to accompany chocolate as a late harvest wine. It stormed most of that week of primary fermentation, but it provided a perfect backdrop to decorate for our Harvest Celebration with the family, which we celebrated our traditional third weekend of October and which will be covered in a separate post, but one of the highlights of the weekend was that the barn was officially renamed The Win...