Hawks Nest Wines of NZ

Hawks Nest Wines of NZ

We picked some of our olives this weekend and have sent them off to the Matakana Olive Growers Co-op for pressing.There are 18 members of the is co-op including us as the least knowledgable . In the photo you can see the large green mat on the ground that is placed under the tree and the team stripping the olives down onto the ground. The brown lab is our son's dog-Lalya- who is supervising the work as you can see. In the background you can see helpers stripping the olives into white picking vests without a net. (we are too cheap the buy more than one net so some smaller trees get picked into the picking vests. This shows the two basic ways to pick olives. I much prefer the mat approach as it is faster and much simpler. Just strip the tree clean and then roll up the olives on the mat and put them in bins and you are done.
We strip the trees clean just as the olives turn color. If you wait to long, the birds pop in and pluck all the ripest olives. If you pick too early, you get green oil. We of course with our great knowledge of olives picked just right!! (ha)

We have 98 olive trees on our orchard/vineyard and we picked 48 trees on this Sat. and Sun. as a social event with friends helping. We got about 700 pounds of olives and will get about 10-12% of that in oil from the press. Thus from this first half of our crop we should get 40 liters of oil=160 bottles at 250cc size bottle. How do we motivate the pickers since we don't pay them? Why with free wine, beer, and food of course!!!! As you can see in the other photo one of our best pickers-Daniel- is refreshing himself with some of our primo 05 barrel sample wine. That is Brett watching from the chair with a Matakana Ale in his hand!! That and lots of pizza will get some olives picked with a lot of good times for sure. The trick is to limit the wine and beer early in the day or the pickers all fade away in the afternoon.

Anyway, we had a fun weekend and now have to decide when to pick the other half of our olives. Who would ever think that we would have way over a half ton of olives to pick? What was I thinking when I ageed with Sandra to plant some olive trees on spare bits of our orchard so we could eventually have a bit of our own oil. (the things we do for our spouses).

That leads to the thought for today.

Longevity==Married men live longer than single men do, but married men are a lot more willing to die!!! (just kidding Sandra)

More soon;

Dr Jim Downunder