......cet article ayant trait à Nyons et ses olives est paru dans le (grand) NEW YORK TIMES daté du 13 janvier 2008......
"Working in an Olive Tree, to a Rhythm of Tradition"
In November and December, my fingers are purple-black, my nails Goth. While the rest of the world is madly dashing around doing holiday shopping, I am up a tree. An olive tree, to be exact. I work the annual harvest.
This is a far cry from my New York years in children’s book publishing, and later doing outreach and H.I.V. testing with street prostitutes, but it suits me better. No thinking required, just hands, the ability to climb a ladder and a tree and "milk" its branches.
Harvesting olives is done in the same way it has been done for hundreds of years. I work a small organic farm with 350 trees in Nyons in northern Provence, where I now live. Nyons is the olive capital of France; its oil was the first to receive an appellation d’origine contrôllée (A.O.C.), similar to what high-quality wines are granted.
Nyons olives are the tanche variety — small, mild, black. Some of the local trees are said to be over 1,000 years old. Olive trees never die but give birth from their stumps to new shoots that grow into trees. They have been in the Mediterranean basin for at least 6,000 years and most likely were brought to Provence by the Greeks before the birth of Christ.
A mature olive tree is almost a sentient being; to spend time with one is an intimate, spiritual experience. Every tree is different, having its own personality and aura. Growers often endow each of their many trees with a human name and human attributes. Sometimes I ponder all that a tree must have witnessed in its majestic silence over the centuries. Each year, I experience a sense of contentment and peace that has rarely, if ever, been present in other jobs I have had.
We begin picking as soon as the sun rises. Eight of us work the three-week harvest. I am often the only woman. We each take a hand-woven wicker basket, securing its leather straps halter-style over our shoulders so the basket hangs at chest level.
We load the back of the tractor with wooden crates marked differently for each picker and grab a heavy eight- or nine-foot wooden ladder that comes to a point at the top so it can easily be steadied inside a tree. Carrying the ladder up to the groves is often the hardest part for me because I’m only 5-foot-2.
Once we arrive, we each take a row of trees and start picking, beginning from the ground. The men, all seasoned pickers, are highly competitive and try to grab the best older trees with four or more trunks at their base and many branches heavy with fruit. We are paid by the hour and also by the total weight of olives picked. It is possible to work the same tree for one or two hours, "milking" the branches with both hands so the olives fall directly into the basket.
The larger olives reserved for eating are cured in a brine solution of 10 percent salt to one liter of water for six months. Others have to be sorted and packed by hand in glass jars for a client who orders them raw — 2,500 jars to be exact, with each jar needing to weigh precisely 808 grams without the lid.
After personally packing close to 2,000 jars every winter, I can now look at a single olive and tell you its weight. This is a rare skill, to be sure, though I don’t see it leading to other exciting and financially remunerative career opportunities.
My other talent is calibrating. Every other day, we take the olives to calibrate at the mill. If you have seen Chaplin’s "Modern Times" or the "I Love Lucy" episode where Lucy works the conveyor belt in a chocolate factory, you’ll have some idea what calibrating is like.
Picture sitting outdoors in freezing cold on a crate for two or three hours nonstop while several hundred olives a minute are spat at you to sort and select from the jaws of an enormous machine. You must be nimble, you must be quick, your concentration cannot wander; you can’t so much as yawn or sneeze.
Once the olives are calibrated, the ones not for eating are cold-pressed into oil using the same method that’s been used for centuries. It takes 5 kilograms of tanche olives to make a liter of oil. Trees yield an average of 15 to 20 kilos of olives. After the olives are washed and crushed into paste, the paste is pressed; out comes the first oil and vegetation water, which are separated by decantation. This is the first cold-pressed extra-virgin oil with a sourness rate of less than 1 percent, the best. The olives we leave at the mill in the morning are liquid gold by night.
We work daily from dawn to dusk, with Sundays off, sometimes. We break for lunch, enjoying a communal meal around an old farm table by a wood-burning stove — bread, cheese, sausage, pâté, hard-boiled eggs, cold meats and sometimes homemade soup, followed by chocolate, fruit and steaming bowls of café au lait. A couple of the men finish off with a shot of vodka. When it rains or the leaves of the trees are wet, we can’t work; the moisture would rot the picked olives.
Evenings I come home, exhausted but happy. On harvest nights I sleep well. I don’t have to worry about the marketplace, climatic changes, profit margins and such; I’m a hired hand, I just pick.
