Tenuta del Barone di Montemurlo — Tuscan extra virgin olive oil
How much oil does an olive tree make
The question everyone who has inherited four trees asks. The honest answer starts with "it depends", but the numbers can be given.
Two different numbers
They always get mixed up. The first is how many olives a tree gives: on a hillside, with mature unirrigated trees, between ten and thirty kilos — with years of five and years of fifty.
The second is the mill yield: how many kilos of oil come from a hundred kilos of olives. In Tuscany that runs between twelve and eighteen per cent depending on cultivar, ripeness and season.
Let us do the sum
A mature tree giving twenty kilos of olives, at a fourteen per cent yield, makes a little under three kilos of oil: barely three litres, which is four 0.75 bottles.
A household using twenty to twenty-five litres a year therefore needs eight to ten mature trees in a normal season. Anyone who inherited four will not fill the pantry, and it is not their fault.
Why one year yes and one year no
Olive trees alternate: a heavy year is followed by a light one, because fruiting uses up the reserves needed to form next year’s buds. Good pruning softens the swing, it does not remove it.
Add late spring frosts, summer drought while the fruit is swelling, and the olive fruit fly, which in humid years can take half the crop.
What it means for the price
A hillside extra virgin, picked by hand and milled the same day, cannot cost what a supermarket oil costs: behind it there is a lower yield, more labour and no economies of scale.
When an extra virgin sells for five euros a litre, somebody along the chain saved on something — almost always on where the olives came from, or on the time between picking and milling.
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