2021 was another difficult year for olive oil producers. In Italy all was looking wonderful – soft rains soaking into the ground in the winter, a warm early Spring, olives beginning to flower beautifully, and then came the early April frost… Those flowers withered and died, and then the drought set in, and it didn’t rain until harvest time. One of our producer’s harvest was reduced by 75% from last year.
In Spain, storm Filomena dumped so much snow on the olive tress that branches were broken off many trees and some were more severely damaged by deep frosts. But luckily, Filomena did not hit Extremadura, and the Valdueza’s farm was not affected. Later, the lack of rain reduced the harvest over Spain.
We have personal experience of what happened in Greece; on a visit to our supplier Lia, we drove past hectares of burnt olive trees, and Cristina told us that although they were not affected by the fires, they had had no rain since May – when on our first trip out of England for two years, only to arrive in a damp Greece.
