Umbria’s Mills Open Their Doors for the New Oil
Umbria’s open-mill season is under way, and this weekend, November 7 and 8, it reaches Trevi, where the Festivol program runs two days of mill visits, tastings, markets and walks through the olive terraces above the Clitunno valley. This note covers what the Frantoi Aperti weekends actually are, why they happen now, and how to get something useful out of one.
What is happening
Frantoi Aperti, open mills, is a string of weekends through the autumn in which Umbrian towns open their working olive mills to visitors. Trevi, Spello, Campello sul Clitunno, Giano dell’Umbria, Gualdo Cattaneo, Castel Ritaldi, Spoleto and several others each take a weekend. The point is simple: the mills are running, the new oil is coming out, and for a few weeks anyone can walk in and taste it at the source.
Trevi’s turn is this Saturday and Sunday. The program lists a farmers’ market and a flea market in the main squares, guided walks through the olive groves, a ride up to a working mill with bread and oil to taste at the end, guided tours of the town, an extra virgin fair at Villa Fabri, tastings of Slow Food presidia in the town’s palaces, music in the streets, an organ recital and a concert in the theater. The Museo della Civiltà dell’Ulivo, Trevi’s olive museum, runs sessions for children. Later in the season, Spello holds the forty-eighth edition of its Festa dell’Olivo e Sagra della Bruschetta on the weekend of December 5 and 6.
Why the timing matters
These festivals are not folklore for its own sake. In central Italy the harvest runs from late October into December, and the oil you taste at a mill in early November was on the tree a day or two earlier. That is the freshest olive oil anybody ever gets to drink, and it tastes of it: green, bitter, peppery enough to catch the throat. Within six months most of that will have faded. Our piece on when and how olives are picked explains the calendar, and the account of a Tuscan harvest describes what those weeks look like from inside a grove.
There is also a commercial reason. Umbrian growers work small plots on steep ground, and they cannot compete on price with anyone. What they can do is sell directly, at a fair price, to people who have just watched their oil being made. A weekend like this is the shortest supply chain in the business.
| Event | When |
|---|---|
| Festivol, Trevi | Saturday November 7 and Sunday November 8, 2009 |
| Festa dell’Olivo e Sagra della Bruschetta, Spello | Saturday December 5 and Sunday December 6, 2009 |
| Umbrian harvest, roughly | Late October to December |
How to get value out of a mill visit
- Taste before you buy, and taste more than one. Fresh oils differ enormously between varieties and mills.
- Ask when the fruit was picked and when it was milled. Same day is the answer you want.
- Buy what you will use within a year, in the smallest container you can, and keep it dark and cool.
- Do not judge a new oil by how smooth it is. The pepper and the bitterness are the point.
If the mill has a museum attached, it is usually worth half an hour: as we argued in our piece on olive oil museums, seeing the old stone wheels next to a modern decanter explains more about the trade than any label ever will.
At an open-mill weekend you will be offered oil from the mill and oil from a stand outside it. They are not always the same thing. A mill presses for many growers, and the bottles on a table at the entrance may be somebody else’s blend with a pretty label. If you want the oil you just watched come out of the machine, ask for the grower whose olives were in the hopper and buy from them.