Every winter the friends harvest about 20 gallons of olives on Hollister’s ranch, Arroyo Hondo, about 30 miles north of Santa Barbara. Many of the trees from which they pick were planted by the Spanish missionaries. The men painstakingly sort green olives from the ripe, then cure them in salt or a mild lye solution to remove their astonishing bitterness and unlock the intense, resonant flavor of home–cured olives, a process that can take a few days to several weeks to complete. “Our original motivation,” says Hollister, “was simply to be able to have good olives at a time, years ago, when none were available.” But the experience brought other pleasures. “I love being in the quiet groves, picking olives from the extraordinary ‘Padre’ tree, some 4 feet around and, at almost 200 years old, witness to so much local history,” says DaRos.

When I met up again with my olive guide from Greece, Phil Meldrun of Food Match Imports, we decided to stage an olive tasting for ourselves: 40 varieties from six countries and all levels of ripeness, from green to beige to pink to purplish brown, arranged side–by–side in little bowls. We proceeded as though we were tasting wines, cleansing our palates with mineral water and bread as we moved from the sublime to the ordinary to the inedible, each the product of many complex interactions: soil, climate and the artfulness of the curing process. He told me stories of intrigue and deception, of olives that were dyed to look greener or blacker, and inferior olives from one country that were sold as top olives from another. One such counterfeit olive from Spain looked exactly like the tiny French Nicosia, of which there is a limited production.

As I listened to his descriptions of passionate growers, harvest rituals and the ancient lands from which they came, I was spellbound by the vibrant culture that surrounds the olive, the same culture that Ozzie Da Ros and J. J. Hollister fell in love with here. Now I seek out olives wherever I wander, never knowing when one will prove to be a revelation, as it was on that Greek island. Recently at the Santa Monica Farmers’ Market I discovered a wrinkly, oil–cured olive from Adam’s Ranch in Strathmore. It was like some small, exotic dried plum, pleasingly bitter, with a faint flavor of cherries and herbs. A hopeful sign.