G 28


rowing olives is a long-term and low-yield proposition. Patience and passion are necessary to nurture these slow-growing trees through the decades and to accept


their uneven crop levels. 2016 and 2015 will be remembered as harvests that couldn’t have been more different.


After a weekend of heavy rain, our nineteenth harvest began under blue skies on November 1—exactly two months after the start of grape crush. The week of sunny, warm days that followed was exactly the kind of weather needed to dry the soils quickly, allowing us to pick our four varieties of olives at the desired ripeness. On the first day of harvest, workers armed with belly-bins moved slowly through our Arbequina trees, using the brucatura method of hand-pulling the plump fruit into buckets strapped to their chests. The rain-soaked grounds made it impossible to use electric combs and branch shakers to drop the olives into nets—a practice that makes no qualitative difference but takes half the time. But, by the second day of


harvest, the ground was dry enough to employ both harvesting techniques. When the last bin of Frantoio olives left for the mill on November 8, we’d picked more than 20 tons of purple- and pink- hued fruit.


Last year, we harvested 44 tons of olives from our three orchards, shattering any previous record at Jordan Estate. Those same trees produced only 12 tons of fruit in 2014. Chef Knoll was surprised at how much fruit the trees were able to bear in 2016 after carrying a record- breaking crop last season. Olive trees are alternate bearing—one vintage bigger and the next one smaller—but recent years of erratic shifts in yields have left us perplexed. Perhaps it’s the


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