Zakros · Sitia · Crete
Past Sitia, at the eastern end of Crete, the road climbs onto a plateau above the Libyan Sea. The ground is more stone than soil. That is where the trees are.
Nikolaos’ grandfather planted most of the trees here. Not to start a business. That was what you did with land you meant to keep.
He worked them his whole life. Olive trees are slow, and the ones he put in are only now at their best.
My grandfather never sold a bottle with his name on it. He planted the trees anyway.
Nikolaos Semertzakis was born in Crete and grew up among these trees. Diana Dabija came from the Republic of Moldova. Olivius is as much a meeting of two countries as it is a grove, and neither of them built it alone.
The work splits the way it does in most family businesses, by who is better at what. Nikolaos is the one in the grove: the pruning, the year of small attentions nobody sees, and the harvest. Diana does the bottling, the analyses, the selling, and everything the name has to carry.
There are no employees, and no fruit is bought in. Nothing is blended with oil from anywhere else. If a year is difficult, you taste that.
Why it matters
Most olive oil sold in Europe is blended, often across several countries, and the label may say so in very small print. Single estate oil is not automatically better. It is the only kind where you can ask which trees and get an answer.
The grove sits at 230 metres on the Zakros plateau, in Sitia, inside the UNESCO Sitia Geopark. Nights are cool that high up. The soil is thin and full of stone. The trees are watered but not pushed, and each one gives little.
Low yield is the point. Slow fruit carries more polyphenols, and polyphenols are what you taste as pepper.
Down the gorge is the Minoan palace at Kato Zakros. They were pressing olives on this plateau three and a half thousand years ago, and you can still stand next to the jars they stored the oil in. We claim no line back to it.
November is when it gets loud. The year that produces it starts much earlier.
Jan to Mar
Pruning
Opening the canopy so light and air reach the inside of the tree. Every cut decides part of next year.
Apr to Jun
Flowering
A few anxious weeks. Wind or heat at the wrong moment and the fruit does not set.
Jul to Oct
Ripening
Watching and watering. Picking early costs yield. Picking late costs everything that makes it good.
November
Harvest
Everything else stops. Picked by hand, tree by tree, and at the mill the same afternoon.
Most of what separates a good olive oil from an ordinary one happens in the hours between the tree and the mill.
The fruit is picked by hand. Nothing is shaken loose or raked off, so it arrives unbruised. A bruised olive starts breaking down before it reaches a press.
The morning’s pick goes to the mill that afternoon. Left in crates for a week, the same fruit from the same trees makes a measurably worse oil.
Milling is cold, below 27 °C. Heat would lift the yield and drive off the compounds you went to all this trouble for. Then straight into tinted glass and sealed tins, because light ages oil faster than time does.
What 0.5% means
Free acidity measures how far the oil has broken down before it reaches you. The legal ceiling for extra virgin is 0.8%. Ours is 0.5%. That number is less a technique than a consequence: it is what hand picked fruit milled the same day gives you.
There is no reserve bottling and no everyday grade. Every size is filled from the same pressing. They exist because some people want to try it and some cook with it daily.
Green almond and cut grass on the nose. Soft at first, then a clean pepper at the back of the throat. That catch is the polyphenols, and it means the oil is young and was handled properly.
Use it raw over tomatoes, bread, grilled fish and beans. It is good on its own and holds up to heat.
Keep it cool and dark, not on the shelf above the hob. Use it within about eighteen months. If you bought a tin, decant some into a smaller bottle and leave the rest sealed.
Those notes are not guesswork. Diana took the tasting panel courses here in Crete, the ones that teach you to describe an oil rather than simply like it. Learning the faults is the part that changes everything: once you can name rancid, fusty and winey, a good oil stops being a matter of opinion.
It has also been judged away from home, and carries medals from Berlin and Athens. Worth saying, because a competition is one of the few places an oil is tasted blind by people with no reason at all to be kind about it.
We run tastings at the farm in Zakros. Not a sales pitch: several oils beside each other, what to smell for, what a fault actually tastes like, and why that peppery catch at the back of the throat is the thing worth looking for.
Depending on the season there is the grove itself, the picking, and the mill in the village. November is the month with the most to see and the least time to show anybody round, so ask early.
If you want longer than an afternoon, the family also lets a house on the coast at Xerokampos, Anna’s House. Sea in the morning, grove in the afternoon.
