From the Archive: Filming Umbria’s Vanishing Olive Harvest (2008)

In 2008, a New York restaurateur premiered a short documentary about the old olive-harvest traditions of Umbria. Behind a small film-festival story sits the real tension of olive oil: romance versus arithmetic.

What was reported

Donna Lennard, owner of the New York restaurant Il Buco, debuted her short documentary La Raccolta (“the harvest”) at a food film festival — capturing the waning traditions of Umbria’s olive harvest and the region’s full-flavoured, herbaceous, spicy oil, with a tasting to follow.

What I make of it now

Films like this are elegies as much as documentaries, and it’s worth being honest about why. The hand-harvest of a steep Umbrian grove — ladders, nets, families, weeks of work — is beautiful, and it is also slow and expensive, which is exactly why it’s vanishing in favour of machines and modern hedgerow groves. I don’t think that’s simply a tragedy: a well-run modern harvest, picked at peak and pressed cold within hours, can make better oil than a romantic but slow traditional one. But something real is lost too — the knowledge, the families, the link to the land. The bottle on your table sits somewhere in that tension between the documentary and the spreadsheet. The Umbrian oil the film celebrates is the bold, peppery Moraiolo style — still very much alive.

Originally reported June 2008, on Donna Lennard’s documentary “La Raccolta.” The original write-up is no longer online.