Fresh pressed olive oil Bilini – First day of harvest 2020

Fresh pressed olive oil Bilini

This time, we shall leave our short video to replace introduction. October the 13th was the first day of our harvest 2020 which brought us ➡️ fresh pressed olive oil Bilini 2020.

First day of harvest

The alarm didn’t have to go off. Olive growers usually don’t sleep well the night before the first day of harvest.

We all find this day tense.  After all, the whole year of hard labour was invested in that fruit. And the harvest represents the pinnacle of the year-around efforts. Therefore, it is really important that all goes as expected.

And it’s not a given that all will be OK. There is a million of things which might go wrong. If any of them surfaces – there’s an issue for ya.

Choosing which cultivars to harvest first

This year we decided to harvest the majority of trees of istarska bjelica cultivar, sooner than usual. Also, we chose to pick some trees of buža which already began to change the color of the fruit. That is optimal time for picking fruit if we want to produce the highest quality extra virgin olive oil.

During the first day of harvest we also took care of several trees of cultivars ascolana tenera and grossa di spagna.

The timeline of activities

Planning is the most important element of every business process. Without a plan, it is hard to expect success, since without it one doesn’t even know what he wants to achieve.

As usual, we synchronized everything for the first day of harvest to pass as it should. Naturally, as we pointed out earlier, in agriculture there are always factors which can’t be influenced (such as weather, for example), but, we were lucky this time.

We synchronized the arrival of the team which helps us harvesting our olives. We agreed with them which trees they will harvest, and which will be left for us to take care of. After we left them to their work, we started picking smaller trees in our olive grove Vrta. Mainly cultivars of buža and buga.

Collecting fruit boxes filled with olives

Since we drive our olives to the olive mill several times during a day, our first round begins around 1 PM. At that time we collect the boxes full of olives in our olive groves and put them on our tractor trailer.

Then, upon arrival to our yard, we reload the boxes from the tractor trailer into our car. Fun!

Driving olives to the olive mill

After a 30 minute drive, our olives arrive from the village of Rakovci to the olive mill for processing. It is very important for olives to be processed within 24 hours upon picking in order for the oil to be of highest quality.

Both rounds of olives from day 1 were processed within 3-4 hours upon delivery to the mill.

On the first day of the harvest, we harvested approx. 1.5 tons of olives (95% of which was the istarska bjelica cultivar), which we processed into approx. 160 kg of the most gorgeous extra virgin olive oil.

There’s olive growing for you. A ton and a half of the fruit which you give your last drop of sweat to grow and harvest, finally gets transformed into 175 liters.

Taste of fresh pressed olive oil Bilini 2020

The taste of this year’s fresh pressed olive oil Bilini is something special: intensive aroma of apple, tomato and conifers. The taste displays intensive bitterness on the tongue and spiciness in the throat. All in all, a very harmonic, top quality extra virgin olive oil.

The rest of the harvest is ahead

We yet have to handle the rest of this year’s harvest. We didn’t want to harvest all olives day-to-day for two reasons. One, the majority of our fruit is still not ripe. We think that it will be ready for harvest sometime between October the 20th and October the 30th, we shall see. Second, immediately after we finished with the first day of picking, four days of rain followed.

The weather forecast is favorable. We hope we will have nice and dry weather in the following two weeks.

And then we shall come one-on-one with our cultivars leccino, frantoio, buža, buga, pendolino, puntoža, maurino, rosignola, itrana, picholine, karbonaca…

If you would like to taste our fresh pressed olive oil Bilini, feel free to click on the button below and place an order in our web shop: