Harvest time

Harvest time mostly depends on the weather conditions in the year of harvest and differences in olive varieties, ie differences in the maturation of each variety.

In the cultivar Oblica, which makes up 80% of our plantations, the harvest mostly starts in the middle, ie in the second half of October, when the olives “spread”. Then you will see all the colors of the fruit on the tree from green to plum color. For Oblica, this is the early stage of maturity, and during such a harvest, the oil will be rich in polyphenols, ie an intense feeling of piquancy and bitterness.

As time goes on, the olives will ripen and the fruit will darken. With a later harvest starting until mid-November, the oil will be milder (reduced intensity of spiciness and bitterness) with less polyphenols in the fruit itself, while the fruitiness and sweetness of the oil will increase as the fruit matures.

Harvesting techniques

Today, harvests are more and more mechanical, mostly due to the lack of labor (pickers), while in some EU countries the harvests are performed with harvesters. We can boast of a hand harvest that we start in the early morning. In this way we manage to preserve all the organoleptic characteristics of our oils and thus achieve much higher quality.

The reason for this is that the fruit in the harvesting process goes through the least possible trauma, so such a process achieves a much higher quality of oil, or “liquid gold” as we do in CMU Sv. Ivan we like to say.

Processing and storage

The moment the fruit is harvested from the tree, the oxidation process begins, which means that the fruit should be processed as soon as possible in order to affect the quality of the oil from the very beginning. In CMU Sv. Ivana in Vodice we have a Rapanelli processing plant, in which the production process from fruit to the first drops of oil does not exceed a temperature of 27 degrees, which ultimately guarantees top quality olive oil obtained exclusively by cold mechanical process – one of the most important steps to a top product.

Just as the harvesting process is important, and then the processing process, so is the storage of the oil itself.

Oils are stored in the basement where the temperature always ranges between 16 -18 degrees. It is aged in stainless steel tanks that are under inert gas, and with such an approach and storage of our oils we slow down the aging process to the maximum, until it is filled into dark glass packaging, which is then sold.