Notes from the blood orange harvest, Catania, January.

The road from Catania climbs without ceremony. By the time you reach the Russo estate at Lentini the city is a soft grey memory below, and the grove begins — twenty-two hectares of moro and tarocco, planted in volcanic soil the colour of wet slate.

It is the third week of January, the only window in which a true sanguinello develops its pigment. The fruit on the southern face has begun to blush. Giulia Russo, who runs the estate with her father, walks the rows each morning at six. She does not pick. She listens. A blood orange ready for harvest, she says, makes a particular sound when its weight is taken in the hand — denser, quieter, closer to stone than to fruit.

There is no machinery on the estate. Picking is done with cotton gloves and wicker baskets, and the fruit moves to the press within nine hours. The Russo family installed their first cold-press in 1962 and have replaced the rollers exactly twice in sixty-four years. The juice that emerges is the colour of garnet and tastes, briefly, of the volcano underneath it.

We are here because a question keeps recurring in the kitchens we work with: why does one blood orange juice taste of grenadine and another of itself? The answer, watching the Russos at first light, is unromantic. It is not soil alone, nor variety, nor altitude. It is the refusal to compromise on the hour at which a fruit is picked, pressed and chilled. Everything else is bookkeeping.

By the time we leave, the first pallets are bound for hotels in Paris, London and Tokyo, each bottle stamped with the harvest day. There are 312 such days in the citrus year on this estate. Each one is accounted for. Each one tastes, faintly, different.