Four varieties of olive grow in Il Rifugio's groves and elsewhere in the region, and until recently, when growers began making oil from single varieties (monoculture oil), good Tuscan olive oil combined all four. They are the morialo, the hardy leccinio, the pollinator or pendolina (evenly distributed around the grove) and the frantoio.

One olive is 10 to 30 percent oil, 25 to 40 percent water and 20 to 50 percent pith.

Extra virgin olive oil contains less than .8 percent acid (down from 1 percent of previous years). Il Rifugio's oil has less than .5 percent. We consider it extra, extra virgin. The key with acidity is all in the timing. The sooner the olives are picked and crushed the lower the acidity.

Il Rifugio's olives are pure organic, good news for the health-conscious connoisseur.

Minerva did for Italians what the goddess Athena did for the Greeks. She gave them the olive tree in all its charm and usefulness. Today, Italy is the premier country for olive oil, and Tuscany the region said to produce the world's most flavorful varieties. Il Rifugio, situated outside the Etruscan hill town of Cortona, offers visitors the chance to experience the olive harvest first hand. Ancient terraced groves surround this exquisite-seventeenth-century farmhouse amidst a landscape reminiscent of a Renaissance painting. A few days' light and engaging labor in the groves will end at the frantoio or olive mill, where pickers can witness the transformation of the raw (and bitter) olives into the green-gold oil that, along with wine, is a staple of the Italian economy, diet, and culture.

Indeed it was our reason for crossing the Atlantic last autumn. For two weeks, we would exchange our twenty-first century orientation to partake in this ancient agrarian ritual.

At Il Rifugio, visitors work in the groves from the time the dew dries on the grass (like apples, olives must be picked dry to prevent rotting) until lunch, and return again for the few remaining hours until twilight, when hand tools downed, nets left spread under the trees and ladders leaning among the boughs, they wander back to the house where wine, dinner, and good conversation await.

Il Rifugio's previous two owners had let the olive groves go to bramble and grass, but since buying the place three years ago Chuck Ofria has brought them back to life. He had the trees pruned, the terraces cleared and mown, and holes dug for new trees. It is traditional to let the holes like fallow all summer and plant the young olive trees from September through November to allow the fall and spring rains to promote good root growth before the Mediterranean summer sets in.

While the young trees have sylph-like figures, it is the several-hundred-year gnarly ones that capture the imagination and speak to something mythic in the landscape. The trees are small, graceful, and vase-shaped, easy to pick and climb. The fruit hangs in clusters amid gray-green leaves. Il Rifugio favors the traditional hand tools that predate Homer - small rakes with which to comb the olives from the branches, short ladders to extend the reach; nets spread under the trees to catch the drops, and willow baskets (cistelli) tied around the waist.

Olive picking is curiously satisfying contemplative work, hardly strenuous, but rather serene and engrossing. If friends drop by to help it is because they, too, feel called to experience that rare sense timelessness the harvest conjures. Indeed, the ritual and history, the spirit of camaraderie among the guests turned olive pickers at Il Rifugio, and the beauty and quiet of the surroundings are hypnotic. When a sumptuous lunch is served on the terrace overlooking the cultivated valley of Cortona, life seems very good indeed.

Afternoon brings another few hours of picking before sunset. More than 500 olive trees grace Il Rifugio's groves. The goal, reached in three unusually balmy days is 500 kilos to take to the frantoio in the nearby market town of Camucia, where Chuck has an appointment that Thursday evening.

At the Frantoio

The earthy smell of olive oil emanates from the mill or frantoio, a 15th-century building at the elbow of a narrow street in Camucia about twenty minutes from Il Rifugio. The place is alive with people milling about, talking, watching, waiting their turn, and paying up. In a side room, separate from the mill's operations, a family celebrated the harvest with hors d'oeuvres and wine by an open fire.

Mill technology is efficient, speedy, and entertaining. It combines the old world with the new. Modern is the vacuum that separates the twigs and leaves from the olives, and the baths in which the olives are washed. Contemporary, too, is the electricity. Traditional are the huge millstones that crush the pulp, already cut, chopped, and ground to a paste. Lastly, a kind of double boiler separates the oil from the water by centrifugal force, and siphons it off. The end product, a greenish golden oil comes out of a spicket and, in our case, fills two kegs.

It takes about forty-five minutes from olive to oil in this cold-press process that involves several stages of crushing and mashing.

It is noisy and colorful, open for all to see, enjoy, photograph, and learn from.

Not all mills operate like this one. Others use a process that involves heat and some, too, will reuse the pulp for a second pressing. But the single, cold press is what makes extra, extra virgin oil so desirable. The difference in taste, we soon discovered, is palpable.

Tastings

Later that night, back at Il Rifugio, Chuck heaves the two kegs of olive oil onto the kitchen counter, and guests gather around for the ceremonial dipping. The oil tastes bitter and sweet at once, quite unlike anything back in the New World. "Grassy," one of the pickers said, and that is the word that seems to spring to people's lips on first tasting. Now, at last, it becomes clear why American tourists enjoy Thanksgiving in Tuscany when the season's virgin olive oil makes its first appearance at table.

A few days later, a neighboring landowner and olive grower takes guests on a blind tasting around the dining room table at Il Rifugio. The oils enhance soups, breads, salads, and pasta, and the best quickly becomes habit forming. In the end, the cold, first press oil made from olives picked locally seems to possess the freshest, cleanest, and most delicate flavor.