Each year, from November into January, olive farmers throughout central and southern Italy begin picking the ripe fruit from their trees. The olives are then put into coarse-weave, plastic sacks or crates and hauled to a local frantoio. These oil-pressing sites, sometimes centuries-old, operate seven days a week during the annual picking season. The frantoio crews work round-the-clock to keep pace with the demand.

Once pressed, an ample portion of the oil is poured into large metal or plastic canisters the local farmers have provided. The farmers cart these full containers back home to serve as their own personal supply of olive oil for the year, often sharing the treasured, premium oil with their extended families and selling it to neighbors and friends. The remaining oil left with the frantoio is sold to large suppliers. These middle-man distributors, in turn, sell the oil to supermarkets and other food outlets serving the general public in Italy and around the world.

Italy is one of the world’s major producers of olive oil. An Italian region long famous for the excellence of its oil is Tuscany. The hilly countryside there with its dry climate and soil is ideal for growing olives, according to Raffaello Resti, an Italian agronomist. Resti provides consulting services to many of the olive farmers in areas near his home not far from Florence. He is passionate in his commitment to protecting the highest standards of olive oil production.

One weekend in mid-November 2004, Resti invited us to tour some of the Tuscan olive groves and to tag along on a visit to a frantoio, Villa A Sesta, in the Chianti area.

A few weeks later in early December, Romano and Pina Sciotti, our neighbors who live south of Rome also invited us to join them as they picked olives in one of their tiny groves. Afterwards we went with them to their nearby neighborhood frantoio, Santa Chiara.

Olive trees can grow an average of two feet each year. They are pruned to a short height and the branches are thinned so the fruit can have maximum exposure to the sun -- “so open a bird can fly through them,” is a rule-of-thumb for pruning the trees.

Extra Virgin, Virgin, or Ordinary Virgin are the three top categories defined in official standards established by the International Olive Oil Council. But the first step in creating all olive oil begins at the frantoio – olive press -- where the process of extracting the oil from the olives takes place. For a frantoio to produce the highest quality oil, two standards are primary: use the freshest olives with the least possible damage to them during the time period of picking and transportation to the frantoio; and during the processing stages of washing, pressing and purifying, maintain a thermal temperature cool enough to avoid altering the chemical composition of the olives at the time they were picked from the tree.