The empeltre olives are left on the tree until they ripen black, in January.
Iván Garcés is thirty-four and has a small shed in Alcañiz that his parents set up in 1979. Pili and Toño cured black olives for half of Bajo Aragón. Iván went off to work in a car factory in Zaragoza and had no plans to come back.
In 2022 Toño retired and the shed was going to close. Iván spent a whole weekend doing the sums. On the Monday he rang the factory and told them he was leaving. His mother still comes in every morning to taste the brine.
He says the tinned black olives in the supermarket are green ones painted black, and that it gets under his skin. His ripen on the tree until January. When someone in Hamburg opens a jar, Iván knows no machine picked those olives.
