Essecke: Olive oil in Koita, Greece

Landscape in Koita

I'm gonna make a quick jump back to our holiday in Greece in November. I know, I already wrote a great deal about it but I never told about our visit to the olive tree fields and to the olive oil press. Of course, I have some pictures too.

Our hotel Citta dei Nicliani mentioned already on their webpage that they can organise olive oil visits. So, I wrote them beforehand that we would be interested. It's all very small scale but worth a visit. The visits are organised only during olive season and that is more or less from October to December.

An olive tree

It was all very easily organised by the son of the hotels owner family.. We aren't exactly experts at Greek so he made all the plans, drove us around and was also our interpreter. It's all very "everybody-know-everybody" down there in Koita. So we actually visited family friends of the hotel owners. First we went to the fields where a family was picking olives. We could watch what they were doing and we could also participated in the picking. We had loads of questions and they all got answered with the help of our interpreter. In Koita they get very less rain so the olives aren't that big but apparently well suited for making oil.

Picking olives

The olives are collected on to a big tarpaulin

Afterwards the olives are bagged

The olive oil press we visited the next day because it's not open everyday. The owner of the press was some sort of a relative (uncle, cousin or something...) of the family we had visited the day before. The press was really small. All the action happened in one room. The olives were brought in big bags and after that they were washed to get rid of the leaves etc. Then the actual pressing started. After various steps we were able to taste the freshly pressed olive oil. We did take some pictures of the different steps but unfortunately they weren't very successful due to the not so good lighting.

The olive oil we tasted was non-filtered and we got told that many of the locals actually prefer it that way. It did taste good. They don't do small bottles so we couldn't buy any to take with us home. Both of the visits didn't cost us anything. The hotel did it for free and they also told us that we shouldn't give the press any money for the trouble because otherwise they will start charging the visitors and that the press already has a good deal because the hotel is buying their oil. All in all very interesting visits and we also got a small glimpse of the local's way of thinking.