Cured olives

After about ten days of water-swapping and rinsing, the olives from our vineyard are now de-bittered enough to move on to the final part of the process. We rinsed them again, drained them and added sliced garlic, a few chilli flakes and fresh-picked rosemary and thyme.

We packed them in preserving jars and topped them up with olive oil. Now they'll sit in a dark, cool corner of the winery for at least five weeks. Then we'll have a tasting with some fresh goat's cheese. Can't wait.

Olives - AE Stallings

Sometimes a craving comes for salt, not sweet,
For fruits that you can eat
Only if pickled in a vat of tears--
A rich and dark and indehiscent meat
Clinging tightly to the pit--on spears

Of toothpicks maybe, drowned beneath a tide
Of vodka and vermouth,
Rocking at the bottom of a wide,
Shallow, long-stemmed glass, and gentrified,
Or rustic, on a plate cracked like a tooth,

A miscellany of the humble hues
Eponymously drab--
Brown greens and purple browns, the blacks and blues
That chart the slow chromatics of a bruise--
Washed down with swigs of barrel wine that stab

The palate with pine-sharpness. They recall
The harvest and its toil,
The nets spread under silver trees that foil
The blue glass of the heavens in the fall--
Daylight packed in treasuries of oil,

Paradigmatic summers that decline
Like singular archaic nouns, the troops
Of hours in retreat. These fruits are mine--
Small bitter drupes
Full of the golden past and cured in brine.