The first time I tasted new olive oil in Italy, I coughed. Not a polite little clearing of the throat. A real cough, eyes watering, while everyone at the table looked delighted with me.
It took me years to understand why that cough was the whole point. And longer still to notice that the color in that little glass is the one I keep bringing home in my suitcase every fall.
A few weeks of green
Across Italy the olive harvest runs from about October into December, depending on the region and the weather, with November the month many growers prefer. It arrives just as the grape harvest winds down. The olives go to the frantoio, the mill, and what comes out first is olio nuovo: unfiltered, a little cloudy, a startling bright green, grassy and bitter and hot at the back of the throat.
It does not stay that way. The Tuscan food writer Giulia Scarpaleggia gives it about three months before the new oil loses that mix of bitterness, pungency and fruit and becomes simply good olive oil. So Italians treat these weeks as a season of their own. In Tuscany the first new oil goes onto fettunta: a thick slice of unsalted Tuscan bread, toasted, rubbed with garlic, soaked in green oil and salted. In Umbria, the Frantoi Aperti festival opens the mills to visitors on weekends from October 17 to November 15 this year, its 29th edition.
The cough is the compliment
That burn has a chemistry. In 2005, researchers writing in Nature traced it to oleocanthal, a compound in fresh extra virgin olive oil that stings the throat and, oddly, behaves a little like ibuprofen. Serious tasters talk about one-cough and two-cough oils, and the two-cough oil is the prize. The fresher the oil, the stronger the sting.
I love this about Italy. A taste that would be sent back as a flaw almost anywhere else is, for a few weeks, exactly what everyone is waiting for.
The color works the same way. That dense, silvery green of the leaves and the new oil — olive — is a shade many American closets still file under army surplus. In Italy I see it treated as a fall neutral, the way we treat camel: something you wear with everything, not something you have to work around.
How to wear the harvest
Which brings me back to the suitcase. The olive pieces I keep choosing are not loud. They are neutrals with some life in them. Olive sits beside black, cream, chocolate, denim and navy without an argument, and in October light it shifts between khaki and green depending on the hour.
The olive eco-leather maxi skirt in these photos is made in Italy by Barbara Alvisi, from polyurethane rather than hide, with a matte, slightly grained surface and a slit at the front for walking. With a plain dark top and a pointed flat, it carries a jacket's worth of texture in a skirt. For the warm days we still get here, the olive print cotton bomber by J-clear does the same job on top, a painterly print in olive, cream and black over white jeans.
Neither needs anything new around it. That is the lesson of the new oil, in a way: something strong and green, used simply, on the plainest things you already have.
And if you find a bottle of olio nuovo this fall — a few importers fly it in each year — open it the day it arrives and pour it on good bread. It is the one Italian thing that gets worse with patience. My olive picks, and the rest of the fall skirts, are in the skirts.
She travels to Italy each season to hand-select the boutique's collection.
Keep reading
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Why Nothing in an Italian Closet Looks Brand New
