Finished - In the nick of time!

Wow,

So we finished up Saturday Morning with the olives for a deadline with the oil pressers at 11am.  We drove 15 "cassettes" or crates over which took 2 trips in her tiny car.  We weighed in at ~250Kilos, or ~551 lbs.  Here is the pic.

The full gallery is here: Here

It ended up taking about 2 hours to get in and out with the oil.  We brought home the 45liters or so of oil back in 2 canisters and set them up to settle.  The process was very fun to watch.  My favorite was the water/oil separators, there was a 2 stage process with 2 separators setup to extract the oil from the water. We ended up with 17% oil from the base weight, which is pretty good.  Last year, they got 20%, but some people, like the person right ahead of us only got 13%.

This process they have here in Parrano is one of the only truly cold presses around.  People come all the way from Firenze (Florence about an hour away, which is a long drive in Europe!).  They patented this unique process several years ago here.  By the way, for all you cold pressed olive connoisseurs, be aware, we learned that not all cold pressed oil is equal.  Most cold pressed is still heated, but they move the thermometer around to cooler places in the oil process away from the heat so they can call it cold pressed! The settling process takes ~15 days to clarify the oil.  It's a wonderful color like nothing out of a bottle, and the aroma is fantastic.

Luckily for us, we finished just in time.  For today all day it's been raining and stormy and now the lightning strikes and thunder fill the air.   Our work here with the olives is fineto(finished), but our work here is not done.  Tomorrow we set out to find a wet sander to sand her marble sink so it won't have standing water in it, as well as other tools for other projects around the house.

Buona Notte!

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La Lingua-
Buona Notte (Good Night, as in good night I/We going to bed)
Buona Serata (Good Night as in have a good rest of your evening, and I won't be seeing you again today, but not good night!)
Buona Sera (Good Evening, as in have a good evening, we might see each other later so we won't say goodbye for now)