2010 Olive Harvest

Posted on December 8, 2010 - by napavalleyolivegrowers

Hello everyone! We’re midway through harvesting season and check out what some of our growers are saying about it:

Rela Gleason of Gleason Olive Oil:

This year our harvest was prolific. In fact we had such a huge crop that we are going to leave some trees unpicked. This is a wonderful “gift” after last year when there was not enough fruit to make it worth harvesting. We are excited about this vintage, which due to our unusual temperature patterns over the past year, promises to be as wonderful as the wines of 2010

Ernie Weir of Hagafen East Side Olive Oil:

The biggest and best olive harvest in many years

Ted Hall from Long Meadow Ranch:

We will be beginning our olive harvest tomorrow (December 7^th) which we expect will be our largest ever. The olives were late ripening because of the long cool growing season, but we are expecting very high quality. We have seen very little activity by the Olive Fruit Fly and the olives look to have a high quantity of oil. We have had a little damage from frost on the valley floor where we have a few orchards, but our primary orchards on the hillsides above Rutherford (where they were first planted in the 1870s) look fabulous. We notice that many of our neighbors seem to have begun harvest at the “normal” time – perhaps because of the requirements imposed by the availability of labor and previously reserved processing windows. We have the luxury of timing our picking with the needs of the variable seasons because we operate our own estate frantoio (since 1996). We are looking forward to the next four weeks with high expectations for a great vintage.”

Kris Jaeger of Jaeger Family Olive Oil:

We harvested our olives this year on the 29th of November. Our trees were very fruit-heavy and the fruit looked beautiful. Wehad high expectations for a bountiful and super-quality harvest. Our Italian and Spanish cultivar fruit was picture perfect. We harvest the fruit and had it milling within hours. The resulting oil is excellent – we are delighted. One hundred percent of the olives that we harvested from our French cultivar, Boutillan, were damaged by frost. We did not press the fruit but had to bury it. This is the first time that our harvest has had damage due to frost. We are grateful for the bounty and the excellent quality of the fruit that was hearty enough to survive the frost. We look forward to a great year ahead.