New Season Extra Virgin Olive Oil Bilini (Harvest 2022)

The new season extra virgin olive oil Bilini is ready! The olive harvest 2022 is over.

Read how this year’s harvest went for us 👇

Preparation of olive groves

Before the harvest begins and before we obtain new season extra virgin olive oil, it is necessary to prepare the olive groves. This can be quite a demanding job if we are dealing with hectares of land. First of all: you should not start mowing much before the planned start of the harvest, because – in years when it is above-average warm – the grass can grow significantly from the mowing day to harvest.

My olive-grove-preparation-plan this year was as follows.

Pre-harvest preparation plan

✅ Removing stones from our olive grove Zacrikva. With each plowing, new bigger and smaller rocks float onto the surface. Just take a look at the pile taken out over a couple of years, just from this olive grove:

✅ Mowing the olive groves. First using a tractor to mow the main portion of land between olive trees. Then use a trimmer to cut the rest of the grass.

✅ Cutting off the shoots that grow from the roots, so that we can wrap all the trees nicely with nets during the harvest.

Unfortunately, not everything can always go according to the plan:

❌ During the mowing of our young olive grove, a series of unfortunate circumstances happened to me. First, my trimmer broke down. Then, while taking down the trimmer, I stepped on a thorn. Just as I was about to take off my sneaker to remove the thorn, I stepped in a grass-covered pits. My knee still hurts from that. We have a saying in Istria: “The devil always sh*ts on a big cup”. Considering I couldn’t cut the grass any longer that day, I started with removal of the shoots from olive trees. I got to one of our oldest buža trees, and – during the work – I sneezed. Two seconds after that, something slammed into my face. I had the impression it was a smaller bird.

And then the pain in the forehead started. Then I heard a buzzing around me. It was hornets. Better said: a whole hornet’s nest within cavity of that tree. They were probably disturbed by my sneezing in an otherwise completely calm environment.

Olive harvest 2022

We survived all the difficulties and started harvesting on October 18. This year’s harvest will remain in my memory as one of the most pleasant. The work was hard, just like every year. Spreading nets, olive picking, making 100,000 steps a day. But…

We had fantastic weather throughout the harvest. We had the feeling that it was late summer and not autumn. The temperature was around 25ºC every day. It was even too hot at times!

This year we also had excellent luck with the fruit: it is extremely healthy = there was no olive fly. Just look at how beautiful those “marbles” are 👇

How much oil the olives yielded this year?

The yield¹ was excellent too! So, not only was the harvest abundant with healthy fruit, with wonderful weather to accompany us. The olives yielded about 15% olive oil this year, which is a slam dunk for us! (we are used to yield of approx. 10%)

The new season extra virgin olive oil Bilini

Every day, immediately upon harvesting, we drove our olives to the best Istrian oil mills (Grubić, Nonno Bruno) for processing. Some days we did three tours to the olive mills. This year, the oil mills were quite crowded, so it was necessary to “maneuver” in order to catch a free container there to unload our olives.

We succeeded in that too. And our faithful Mazda Premacy pulled another 8.5 tons of olives from the village of Rakovci to the oil mills.

And after 9 hard days and work from morning to night, we stored our new season extra virgin olive oil Bilini in barrels. Its beautiful green color², fruity aroma and wonderful harmonic taste with bitterness and spiciness give us a hint of the possibility of recognition and awards for EVOO Bilini this year too 🏆

I couldn’t wait any longer… As soon as I brought the first round of oil home, I poured myself some to smell and taste:

If you wish to taste the new season Bilini extra virgin olive oil, click on the button below and choose the desired package in our web shop!

The price of this year’s extra virgin olive oil Bilini

We have good news for you. Despite the price increase of… well, everything, we decided not to raise the prices of our olive oil. Therefore, EVOO Bilini prices remain unchanged. 😊

¹ The oil yield from processed olives is calculated as follows: if a ton of olives yields 11% of oil, it means that we get 110 kilograms of oil per one tone of olives. Attention: a liter and a kilogram of olive oil are not one and the same. To calculate how many liters we get from the given example: 110 kg of oil should be multiplied by 1,085 👉 finally we come to 119.35 liters of olive oil from 1 ton of olives.

² The green color in fresh extra virgin olive oil comes primarily from chlorophyll from olives. Through the periodic repouring of olive oil throughout the year, as well as the process of oil ripening, the green color gradually disappears. That’s why – if you desire grass-green coloured oil 😊 order it now.