Italy’s Toughest Olive Harvest Yet
As the 2023 harvest got under way, Italy’s growers reached again for the word they’d worn out over the previous decade: the worst they could remember. By now it was less a shock than a season.
What happened
Italy faced a historically challenging 2023 harvest — battered by erratic weather, drought, floods in some regions, pests, and the ever-present Xylella in the south. It came on top of a thin year across the wider Mediterranean, ensuring the global shortfall ran deep.
Why it mattered
A weak Italian crop matters twice over: Italy is a big producer and the world’s great bottler and re-exporter. When Italy is short of its own olives, even more oil gets imported, blended and bottled under the Italian flag — and the temptation to cut corners, or worse, climbs with the price.
“Worst harvest in memory” stopped being news somewhere around 2017 and became the weather report. The honest takeaway for anyone who loves this oil: cheap, reliable Mediterranean abundance is a thing of the past, and a fair price for real oil is now the price of keeping the groves — and the growers — alive.
Background, autumn 2023: contemporary harvest reporting (Olive Oil Times and others).