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 would have wanted to know what it tasted like.
Nikolaos Semertzakis grew up among these trees. Diana Dobîja came from Romania, learned the work, and now knows the grove as well as he does.
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 – Mar
Pruning
Opening the canopy so light and air reach the inside of the tree. Every cut decides part of next year.
Apr – Jun
Flowering
A few anxious weeks. Wind or heat at the wrong moment and the fruit does not set.
Jul – 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 0.2% 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 0.2%. 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. The 250 ml bottle and the 5 litre tin hold the same oil. Both 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.
This year’s harvest
Five sizes, one oil. Shipped from Crete and from Frankfurt across the European Union.
All sizes