CALENZANO, Italy — Strolling through the olive grove that abuts his family villa on a gloomy November morning, Federico Dufour knelt to the ground and picked up a few purplish, pellet-size lumps. “I am ashamed to call them olives,” he said mournfully.
Inviting closer inspection of a tiny perforation, he displayed the withered fruits on his palm. “Look, here’s a hole,” he said, then described the brief but devastating life cycle of an olive fruit fly that had ravaged his crop.
In its lifetime, each fly can deposit hundreds of eggs in as many olives, wiping out entire olive groves “in no time,” he said. “It’s an infinite drama.”
This year, that drama played out in hundreds of olive oil producing farms in Tuscany and other parts of Italy, helping make 2014 Italian olive oil’s annus horribilis.
Aside from the fly — the Bactrocera oleae, to be precise — severe hailstorms and flooding, and a devastating bacteria in parts of Puglia, Italy’s largest olive oil producing region, cut olive production by about 35 percent.
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