The grapes are purple in the vines, the fig trees are laden with sticky delights and the olives are looking beautiful against blue September skies. Though the weather is warm and winter clothes are still packed away in boxes, our thoughts are already beginning to turn to the olive harvest which will come soon after picking our grapes. Writing this has had me thinking of the delicious bruschetta with olio “novo” that await us in just a couple of months.

2010 started out with four heavy and unusual snowfalls in quick succession. The last was in mid-March by which point the romance of being trapped on the estate for days on end had begun to pall. The olive trees were thick with blossom this year and we look forward to an extremely good yield in terms of both quantity and quality. There was hail once in May but the olives were small enough to be unscathed (mercifully the grapes were unaffected too). Abundant rain in June and early July meant that water levels were high and there was no stress idrico during the heat of late summer. Best of all, this year, like 2009, the dreaded Olive Fly shows no signs of showing its ugly face and 2010 looks like it will go down in history as a great year for Extra Virgin Olive Oil in Tuscany.

This week we are finalising the details of our olive tree adoption project, Club100. Please email me at laura@ilpalazzone.mikelee.nyc for details.