Meet your harvest.

You scanned this one.

Where it comes from

The western Peloponnese is Greece’s Ionian edge — home to Ancient Olympia, and olive country before it was anything else. Everything in this tin was grown there, from our family’s Koroneiki trees and the groves around them. One region. One variety. One harvest.

What Koroneiki is

A small olive that gives a lot of flavor for its size — the variety behind most Greek olive oil, and the only one in this tin. Nothing else is blended in to soften it or stretch it. The green-gold color and the fruit in the taste come from the olive, and nothing else.

How it was made

Picked by hand. Pressed cold, by mechanical means only — no heat, nothing added. Not blended, not refined. From the press to the tin, and from the tin to you.

What the marks on the tin mean

Two marks, two different things.

Lab results

Every extra virgin olive oil is defined by numbers — free acidity, peroxide value, and three ultraviolet readings called K232, K268 and ΔK. They show whether the fruit was sound and the oil was handled well. The sixth number, total polyphenols, is the one people ask about most, and it has its own section below.

Polyphenols

The bitterness on the tongue and the tickle at the back of the throat are not flavors added to the oil. They are polyphenols — compounds the olive makes to protect itself, which survive into the oil when the fruit is picked sound and pressed cold. The one you feel in the throat has a name, oleocanthal. The bitter edge comes from its relatives, oleacein among them.

They matter for a plain reason: they are the oil’s own antioxidants. An oil with more of them resists going rancid, keeps its character longer, and tastes like something. They are also the reason olive oil gets studied the way it does, which is why you’ll see a number quoted. The figure quoted most often is 250 mg/kg: in the EU, an oil that tests at or above it may carry a regulated statement about its polyphenols. We don’t make health claims on this page. We post the number and the test behind it, and leave the reading to you.

Koroneiki is a variety that runs high in them, and green, early-picked fruit runs higher than fruit left to ripen. Then they are spent: time, heat, light and air each take a share, so the same oil tested at the mill and a year later will not read the same. That is why the figure we post comes with the date it was measured, and why the tin, the cupboard and the lid matter more than anything printed on the outside.

One complication, said plainly: there is more than one way to measure polyphenols — a chromatography method the International Olive Council uses, an older colorimetric one, and an NMR method developed in Athens — and they do not give the same number for the same oil. A figure without its method can’t be compared with anything. Ours will name the method.

What polyphenols actually do, at length →

How it tastes

Fruity and grassy at the front. Buttery in the middle, and bright. A peppery tickle at the back of the throat — the sign it’s fresh.

That tickle is not a fault. It fades as the oil ages, and a fresh Koroneiki should have it.

Pour it on something simple.

• Bread, a pinch of salt.
• Tomatoes, cut, nothing else.
• Greens, boiled, with lemon.
• A fried egg.

You'll understand.

Keeping it

Heat, light and air are what age olive oil. The tin takes care of the light. You take care of the rest: closed, somewhere cool, away from the stove. If you bought a 3- or 5-liter tin, decant a week's worth into something small for the counter and keep the big tin shut. And use it — olive oil is a fruit juice with a clock, and it's at its best in the year after harvest. A big tin isn't for saving. It's for cooking.

When you run out

This harvest will be on the shop when it lands. Leave your email and we'll tell you the day it's up — and again when the next harvest is pressed. Nothing else, ever.