The Harvest
The harvest is one of the crucial phases of the olive-press life cycle, a moment of hard-work and an emotional one, from which depends the quality of the final product.
Once we arrive ad the intermediate stage of maturation, the precious fruits are collected in order to be brought quickly to the olive-press, so that they can be milled within 24 hours, in order to make sure that olives' organoleptic characteristics are preserved and a top quality extra virgin oil can be obtained as a result.
In the olive-press, olives are distributed in bins with a progressive barcode, then they are weight us-ing an electricity balance, and eventually are stored in a well-ventilated place, so that fermentation and bacterial populations and/or mould are avoided. In order to increase the excellence of the prod-uct, the farm have decided to introduce in 2017 the Combine Harvester New Holland for the har-vest of over-intensive olive trees, the first ever in the County of Foggia. Thanks to this machine we are able to collect an hectare of olive trees in about two hours.
At the Mill
The Oil Mill is equipped with two production lines, a three-phase continuous cycle system and a two-phase cycle system, both with cold extraction, both with defoliate, washing and pit removal machines. After that step, the malaxation process takes place, followed by separation with decanter and last separation with separator.
The Milling
The milling takes place with pitted processing made with machine MOLIDEN-LEONE. This innova-tive system, patented by Pietro Leone and his sons Pietro, Luigi and Michele, operates with two roll-ers which work with different rpms. The olives are broken and crushed in a very sensitive manner, eliminating any kind of stress for the fruit. Eventually, with a separation cage, 70% of broken pits (“nocciolino, little pit”) are divided from the pulp and the remaining 30% is left there, as it facilitates the pressing. The pulp obtained from the pressing is moved to the press bench for a perfect crush-ing, where it remains for about 40 minutes, by maintaining a constant and always monitored tem-perature of 27°C. From this operation, a by-product called “nocciolino” (little pit), is obtained, ready to use, and used in the press-olive itself.
Eventually, centrifuge extraction with decanter takes place, where a continuous separation of oil from the vegetal water and olive residue takes place.
The Storage
Oil is then processed with a second centrifugation made by separator and then stored in hermetical-ly sealed iron silos, equipped with a nitrogen system for a better preservation, in a place not subject to remarkable temperature changes.