Finally - The Summer World Olive Press Newsletter

For Spacious Skies.....California Olive Production

It didn't take much urging from early reviewers of our book for us to be convinced that our knowledge would be more complete if we visited olive groves and producers in the United States.  While olive production in the US is growing and today, groves can be found in Texas and several southeaster states, it is the state of California that is the center of the olive industry "stateside."

So it was that we dedicated two weeks to travel to CA in June and visit 10 different olive centers, from small organic groves such as Grumpy Goats in Capay Valley to massive California Olive Ranch near Chico.  We traveled up and down the Central Valley and learned about water rights and regulations and innovative milling processes and the diversified wine/oil estates.  There we found as we have always found on every continent we have visited, wonderful people happy to share their olive oil knowledge with us.  We were so glad we went and you can read about all of this in our newest post.

While we were already out in California, we were lucky enough to be able to take the Sensory Evaluation of Olive Oil Workshop at UC Davis.  This four day course showed us how tasters are trained and how a panel's taste responses are honed by repetition and consultation.  It was an amazing course - well worth it and now, Rich and I are indeed "CERTIFIED" as having taken the class.  Note that we are not certified as tasters or certified as having PASSED the class, but yes, we certainly did take it and enjoyed tasting what felt like close to 500 different oils over the four days.  

Apologies for the delay, but getting our book to the publishers at the end of July and then preparing for Fall classes took precedence.  We hope better late than never.

You can get the newsletter here.

August 1: The Chemical Story of Olive Oil is submitted and our Book is in Production!

Midnight August 1:  Rich has just pressed "SEND" on the zipped file containing our ten chapters, the 190 images, the cameos, and references.  The files are so large, that the Royal Society has a special website devoted to the FILE TRANSFERS necessary for this book project.  We watched as the seconds ticked by until we got the "SUCCESSFUL TRANSFER" screen that told our book has been submitted!!!

Despite bombings in the Istanbul airport and an attempted coup, we worked with almost daily conversations and hourly emails with Zeynep across in Turkey, and finished on time.

A BIG HUGE THANK YOU to all of our reviewers, who gave us important feedback on a tight schedule and without a stipend, and photographers, whose generosity in freely sharing their images, time and talent, and our cameo people who reviewed our vignettes of them and their lives and provided important corrections and better images, and even to the people whose work we hoped to include, but the space limitation precluded our adding them.
Our acknowledgements list about 150 people.


Our recuperation began with a quick drive up to New Hampshire to visit our youngest daughter, Becca, at her job as an Assistant Camp Director.  Then, we headed out to Cape Cod, presented a talk to Amherst College alumni at a luncheon at the Eastward Ho! Private Golf Club in Chatham.  We spoke on "Tales from the Grove" our olive oil story, and did a tasting with about 40 attendees.  Alumni were excited to taste the oils we has assembled from many of the places we had visited on our travels.  When I got to the section on cardiovascular health, and remembering I was in a crowd of Amherst College alumni, I made a point to ask how many in the audience were cardiovascular physicians or surgeons.  Three alums shyly raised their hands but gave me a thumbs up.  I was doing good!  Phew!  Later, we relaxed with some peaceful walks along Nauset Beach, ate some amazing fish at Freddie's Fish Shack on the bay, and got a wonderful night's sleep at Ship's Knees in Orleans.

Back home for a day, then headed north to Maine for a week long Mission trip with our church youth group.  Later, we enjoyed some really welcome family time with our Denver duo of Sarah and Julia before the semester descended upon us.  We found that it was just a short hop from our family cottage on Owasco Lake to the Anyelas winery on Skaneateles Lake in the Finger Lakes Region of New York. 

So, with September staring us down, syllabi had to be prepared, class lists set up, and labs directed and life is back to normal (?)