By Diane Peterson
Savor Wine Country

Olive harvest begins at Stella Cadente
Photo by Charlie Gesell/Savor Wine Country

Some harvest parties in Wine Country call for black-tie tuxedos and high heels. Others - well, others might just require that you hang a tin bucket around your neck.

At the Anderson Valley ranch where Sue Ellery and Tom Hunter launched Stella Cadente Olive Oil in 1999, friends and colleagues gather each November to don garden gloves, boots and buckets fashioned from olive oil tins for a gala picking party and harvest lunch served on long, wooden tables next to a crackling fire.

A similar ritual unfolds all over Wine Country in late autumn, as artisan oil producers celebrate the harvest Italian-style, with lots of friends helping to pick the olives while sharing the bounty of the North Bay's gardens and vineyards.

On a crisp fall morning in mid-November, with the sun piercing through the mist and the olives ripening into stunning hues of dark purple and green, about two dozen pickers - grape growers, chefs, B&B owners, artists and other assorted "experts" - gather at the 6.5-acre Stella Cadente olive grove for an all-day picking marathon punctuated by a leisurely fall feast. When the fog of early morning lifts completely from the grove, pickers doff their slickers and jackets and bask in the last, warm rays of the season slanting through the dew-soaked redwood trees.

"There's such a sense of the fall in the air," says documentary filmmaker Lisa Frederickson of Mendocino, proudly donning her broken-in gardening gloves. "My kids love to go to the Boonville Fair and try the apples and the olive oil. There's such an abundance here."

Stella Cadente - Italian for shooting star, like those frequently visible in the night sky above the Anderson Valley ranch in October and November - is the pioneering olive oil producer in Mendocino County, producing about 1,000 gallons a year. But olive oil's star is blazingly hot across the rest of the state as well, with a growing number of producers nearly rivaling France now in terms of volume. At last count, there were 528 growers in the state, including 114 in Sonoma County, 75 in Napa and 18 in Mendocino County.

Harvested from four Tuscan varietals - Frantoio, Leccino, Pendolino and Coratina - Stella Cadente's extra virgin olive oil is liquid gold, boasting a peppery, grassy flavor that makes it ideal as a dipping sauce for bread or finishing oil for fish or meat.

At the McCallum House in Mendocino, executive chef Alan Kantor drizzles the Stella Cadente oil over fish or on top of housemade mozzarella with porcini mushrooms and roasted bell peppers. In December, when the green, first-press "olio nuovo" is available from Stella Cadente, he likes to drizzle it over a vegetable pasta.

"It's adding a fresh, vibrant flavor to something that's already cooked," he says. "All of a sudden you have a flash of raw flavor ... it's like tasting a fine wine."

Stella Cadente has already won prestigious awards. Its most popular oil - the Blood Orange Extra Virgin Olive Oil - won a gold medal at the L.A. County Fair's 2003 Olive Oils of the World competition. The Stella Cadente L'Autunno Blend Extra Virgin Oil (made from their own Italian olives blended with mission olives) was named one of the Top 35 Oils in the World by Der Feinschmecker, Germany's premier gourmet magazine, in 2004.

"It's pretty special stuff - the yields and the production are lower than wine grapes," notes Paul Vossen, UC Cooperative farm adviser and California Olive Oil Council adviser. "Grown on the North Coast, hand-harvested, processed immediately and bottled, it is a fabulous olive oil. There are not many people who recognize that."

While some olive oil producers use vibrating rakes or poles to knock the olives off the branches, Stella Cadente relies on friends to pick each olive by hand, making the harvest a true labor of love.

"You're trying to get little marbles off a tree," Vossen says. "It's not like apples, where you have a big thing with some weight to it. ... Picked individually, there's a lot of romance involved."

Luckily, there's also lot of friendly banter among pickers to make the labor-intensive hours pass more quickly. During the morning, pickers can also dream of the delicious lunch that awaits them.

"Picking olives, unlike grape-picking, is a much cleaner process," Ellery says. "There's no bending and stooping, no knives and red-stained hands."

The fall feast

"Two guys from Sicily would have this all done by now," quips John Dickerson of Redwood Valley as he empties his bucket into the main olive bin. "Everybody is here for the wine and food."

Then, as more olives tumble into the bin, the work crew heads into the couple’s elegant "barnhouse" for lunch, leaving their muddy boots at the door.

The fall feast, prepared by caterer Terry McMillan of Inspired Events, is a cornucopia of fruits and vegetables: a butternut squash soup with a magenta swirl of beet coulis; a spicy arugula salad studded with candied pecans, gorgonzola and pears; and a rich, braised Moroccan-style lamb tagine with dates, couscous and roasted vegetables. And for dessert, an apple-persimmon crumble, inspired by Ellery's British roots.

Casey Hartlip, winemaker at John Scharffenberger's Eaglepoint Ranch Winery in Anderson Valley, shares some of his Petite Syrah and Grenache. There is also some seasonal L'Automne Pinot Noir, from Copain's second-label Saisons des Vins, sourced from Cerise Vineyards in Mendocino County.

After lunch, the "expert pickers" from Stella Cadente go back to the fields with the knowledge that 8,000 miles away in the fields of Italy, others are experiencing similar joys, eating a delicious meal and drinking local wine while picking what Ellery calls "the noble liquid gold fruit."

Back to earth

Like others who have chosen the country life amid the rolling hills of Mendocino County, Ellery and Hunter both had successful careers in the high-tech industry before deciding to sink their cash back into the earth.

Ellery, 57, was born near Guildford-in-Surrey, about 45 minutes southwest of London, in "the stockbroker belt." Her father, who lived in Naples during and after World War II, was an avid gardener who piqued her love of Italian food by taking her back to Italy.

"He was nuts about olive trees and oil," she says. "We grew up using a lot of olive oil, and my exposure came from that."

With a degree in journalism, Ellery worked her way up from a copy writer to public relations and computer education. She moved to L.A. at age 28, reinvented herself as a sales engineer, then started her own consulting company, helping start-ups write business plans. Eventually, she launched her own software technology company.

Hunter, 56, grew up in central Illinois, where he worked on farms and baled hay as a teenager. He spent 25 years in the high-tech world, holding management positions in both hardware and software companies. The couple met in Silicon Valley in 1987, married in 1993, and set up house in Half Moon Bay.

Silicon Valley to Anderson Valley

Meanwhile, Ellery bought the Anderson Valley property in 1991 and loved spending every weekend tending her vegetables and herbs.

"I wanted to stick my fingers in the ground, literally," she says. "I always think people come full circle. I did my whole business career and accomplished a lot, but I like a simpler form of existence."

Hunter, who is in charge of operations and finance at Stella Cadente, left the high-tech world in 1999. Ellery, who takes care of sales and marketing, worked her way out of Silicon Valley by 2000. At the Anderson Valley ranch, they not only grow their own olives, they tend a UC Davis test plot of 80 trees used to study the effects of climate and soil on 12 different varietals. They also make olive oil for Fetzer and Bonterra Vineyards, and Ellery serves on the board of the California Olive Oil Council.

Life at the Stella Cadente ranch, now in its fifth year of harvest, revolves around the seasons of the olive, from the pruning and bloom period in May through the crucial harvest and crushing period, from November through January. As with grapes, the decision of when to pick the olives is critical to the oil's ultimate quality and style. Olives are usually picked when some, but not all, of the fruit are ripe.

"Ripe fruit gives you undertones of tropical fruits, citrus, berry, mint. Green fruit gives you artichokes, grass, herb, nettle," says Vossen. "The best olive oils usually have a bit of both of that, so you have to pick at the right time."

During the first couple of harvests, Ellery and Hunter cooked the celebratory feast themselves - Ellery loves to cook cassoulet and other treats for friends - but in recent years, they've handed off the cooking in order to concentrate on the harvest.

They drive the olives down to McEvoy Ranch in Petaluma to be crushed, racing against the clock to get the fruit to the press within eight hours of being hand-picked. That ensures that their extra virgin olive oils - the olio nuovo, L'Autunno Blend, Meyer Lemon, Blood Orange and Everyday oils - will reach the height of flavor when they are poured into individual Italian dark-glass bottles, for sale in pairs at prices ranging from $20 to $40.

Stella Cadente oils are also available in bulk at three self-service olive oil bars: Brutocao Cellars in Hopland, Meyer Family Cellars in Boonville and Napa Wine Merchant in Napa.

"It's rich, tart and bitter, with the polyphenols in the back of your throat," says Julie Liebenbaum, chef/owner of the Boonville General Store, as she plucks the olives off the branches. "It's delicious."

Sunday, September 11, 2005
Copyright © 2005 The Press Democrat