My father did it this way. His father did it this way. None of them shipped what they wouldn't serve. That sentence is almost the whole of it.
The short version is that my family has grown olives in our Kalamata grove for over a hundred years, and in all of those years nobody has seen a reason to pick them any later, press them any hotter, or blend the oil with anything else in order to sell more of it. The long version is the same sentence, told across three generations, and it makes up roughly everything I know about the thing we do.
What my grandfather did
My grandfather grew olives on the terraces his own father had cut out of limestone before him. He used a hand saw and a set of loppers. He pruned in December. He picked green. He picked by hand. He sold half of what he pressed to neighbors who knew him and ate the other half with his family at a kitchen table that sat eight. What he didn't serve at that kitchen table, he did not sell to anyone else.
I know this because my father told me so, once, in 1988, on the morning after we had finished the pruning and the olive wood was stacked by the back wall of the house waiting to be burned. He was twenty-three years younger than I am now. He was not a sentimental man. He was telling me so because I had asked, the night before, whether we might ever consider selling the late-November fruit — which is a touch sweeter, a little less green, and considerably more abundant — to a blending house that wanted it.
No, he said. You press it. You drink what you'd give a guest.
What my father did
My father did the same. He pruned in December. He picked green. He picked by hand. He drove the crates to the same mill we drive them to now, up the road to Trikorfo, where a family we know runs the press and holds the twelve-hour rule we agree with.
When he got older and the pickers got younger he hired pickers who had picked with him for years, and he paid them what he would have paid himself if he were still doing the climbing. When the blending houses came back to him — not the same one as in 1988, but a larger one, in the early 2000s, with a better offer — he said the same thing. You press it. You drink what you'd give a guest.
He did not expand the grove. He did not pursue a larger press. He did not experiment with later-harvest cultivars that would have yielded more oil per acre. He grew olives, made oil, gave away what he didn't need. That was the business.
What I do
Nothing different. I prune in December. I pick green. I pick by hand. The same pickers — some of them now with their own grown children, one of whom I can see from my window on mornings I'm in Kalamata, carrying a ladder up the stone steps the way his father carried it for my father.
The difference is that in 2019 I started bringing the oil to the United States, because I live in Dallas and because this is where the shelf I wanted us on — Central Market, H-E-B, Brookshire's, Super 1 Foods — is. That is a logistical change, not a compositional one. The oil is the same oil. We press it. You drink what we would give a guest.
Why I am writing to you about this
Because the thing we sell is, in one frame, a stack of skipped shortcuts. Pick later, save two weeks of labor. Press hotter, make five percent more oil. Blend with neighbor fruit, stretch the barrel. Ship to a broker, skip the US importer step. We have not done any of these things, and we have not done them, specifically, for three generations in the same grove, which means at a certain point the not-doing becomes what the grove is rather than a policy about it.
That is, as far as I can tell, the only thing worth saying about us. Everything else on our website — the Kalamata PDO, the 2017 lab panel, the twelve-hour rule, the cold press, the dark glass — is a way of documenting that one sentence.
The next letter will be something lighter. I owe you a recipe and a note about how the 2025/26 harvest came in.
— George Maniatis
Dallas, Texas · from the grove, in Kalamata