The Olive Oil Pilgrimage: Koroneiki Pressed in Mani

There is a moment in November in the Mani Peninsula when every conversation stops and becomes about olives. The harvest has arrived. The nets are spread beneath the trees. The Koroneiki olive—Greece's primary cultivar, small and green and intensely flavoured—is at its peak. Entire extended families mobilise. The pressing mills operate through the night, their motors heard across the silent stone villages, the smell of fresh-pressed oil hanging over everything like a warm, grassy fog.

The Mani is a harsh landscape—the spine of the Taygetos mountain range drops directly into the sea, leaving narrow strips of terraced land where the olive trees have been coaxed into existence over thousands of years. The trees here are old. Some are four, five hundred years old, their trunks twisted into monumental sculptures by the wind and time. The roots go deep into the rocky soil, finding water where there should be none.

I visited an oil producer outside Areopoli who farms three thousand trees alone, using no machinery for the harvest. He pressed a bottle of this year's first pressing—'agourelaio', the early harvest oil—and handed it to me. The colour was a turbid, electric green. The taste was extraordinary: peppery and aggressive, almost spicy at the back of the throat, with a grassy, herbaceous sweetness beneath it. This is what olive oil is before it becomes the mild, well-behaved thing in the supermarket bottle.

Buy your oil directly from producers in the Mani. You can find them at the small markets in Areopoli and Gythio in November and December. It will ruin you for supermarket oil forever, and this is a completely acceptable sacrifice.