It's November now, and there's just a couple of weeks before we pack up and return to Yallingup, Western Australia for the Aussie summer. The autumn weather has been beautiful, the colours in our mountains surrounding us are gorgeous and the sun has been shining.

Our Italian tour season ended a few weeks ago so we've been spending time with family and friends, and doing all those odd jobs around our home. We spent the last weekend of October picking olives which was lots of fun. The glorious sunshine has made the olive picking season an absolute pleasure.

It was a generous harvest this year - we picked 700kg of olives. We took them to the local pressing factory and it produced 110 litres of superb olive oil. During the olive picking season there are plenty of “olio nuovo" dinners to celebrate and taste the new olive oil. The colour is green rather than yellow, and the fresh oil has a peppery nearly bitter flavour.

Generally they will grill fresh Tuscan bread on the open coals in front of the fire place and then generously drizzle olive oil over it, enabling you to really taste the peppery flavour.

We will be squeezing a bottle in to bring back to Yallingup to enjoy with our staff and family.