There is a grove on stone terraces above the Messinian Gulf, in the southern Peloponnese, that has belonged to my family for over a hundred years. It belongs to me now. I keep it because my father kept it, and because his father kept it, and because his father before him chose the first Koroneiki saplings and dug the first holes on a stretch of land that, before them, was rocky pasture unsuited for much else.
The trees are small. Koroneiki is the cultivar of the southern Peloponnese — compact, silver-leaved, small-fruited — and on our hill, limited further by a thin soil over limestone, the trees never get very tall. A first-time visitor is usually surprised. American olive-tree imagery is the Tuscan kind: big, round, shaped, impressively ancient. Our trees look more like determined old people than like landmarks. They are gnarled at the trunk. Their leaves catch the wind and flash silver. Their fruit is the size of a fingernail. And they produce a lot of oil.
What my father taught me about the grove, which was not very much
My father was a practical man who did not explain what he did. He pruned. He pruned a great deal, and he pruned at the right time, which, on our hill, is December, after the harvest, when the tree has given up its fruit and has a few months of rest before budding again. He pruned with a hand saw that lived on a hook inside the shed door and a set of loppers older than I am. I have both now.
He did not explain, for example, why the tree on the south corner of our terrace-seven gets more sun than the other ten trees on that terrace and so carries more fruit but somehow, year after year, produces oil that tastes sharper than the rest of the grove. He may not have known. He simply knew it, the way he knew that the south corner was where to put the slower-growing saplings if you wanted them to fruit reliably.
What he did explain, because it was the only thing about olive oil he considered urgent, was this: the fruit has to move. He would say it in Greek — η καρπος πρεπει να κινηθει — on the day of harvest, watching the pickers work at the baskets. You pick green, you pick fast, you load the truck, you drive. The trees have already given the oil all they can. Everything from that moment on is a small war against time.
Why green
The window when Koroneiki tastes the most like itself is the last two weeks of November and the first week of December. This is the early-harvest window. In some years, depending on how late the summer rains came and how hot September was, it stretches a few days one way or the other. I have never, in my lifetime or my father's before me, picked after the middle of December.
The fruit begins to turn — from green to violet, then to a soft almost-black — and as it turns, the oil gains sweetness and loses the bite of polyphenols that is the signature of a Greek early-harvest oil. A late-harvest Koroneiki is a milder oil, a gentler oil, the kind of oil your grandmother uses to fry potatoes. That is not a bad thing, but it is not what we make. What we make is the green-banana, cut-grass, tomato-leaf-and-black-pepper oil that comes out of fruit still unconvinced it is food.
We pick by hand. You can pick Koroneiki with a machine now — there are trucks that shake the branches and catch the fruit on a tarp — and that is the way most of the grove-owning people I grew up near have chosen. We do not, for three reasons. First, the hill is terraced stone, and the machines are heavy, and we are not going to take the terraces apart in order to pick them faster. Second, the small fruit bruises; machine picking bruises Koroneiki in a way that shortens the twelve-hour window to something closer to eight. Third, the pickers. I grew up with the same five or six pickers I still hire today. One of them picked with my father when my father picked with his father.
Why I write to you from Dallas
In 2019 I moved the first cases of our oil across the Atlantic and into a warehouse off Quebec Street in Dallas, because I live here and because this is the part of America I know well enough to open a brand in. The retailers who shaped that decision are Central Market, which is a specialty-grocery banner inside H-E-B, and H-E-B itself, and Brookshire's, and Super 1 Foods — and between them they represent the largest regional specialty-grocery network in the southern United States.
What I could not have predicted, when I made that move, was how much of the story of our family I would learn to tell in English as a consequence. Writing for a reader who is not Greek has forced me to put words to things my grandfather said without words and my father never bothered to explain. The fruit has to move. That is not a marketing line. That is the whole of his instruction, in four words of Greek.
I hope the grove is here in another hundred years. I think it will be. Koroneiki is a resilient tree, the hill has been terraced by people who built for permanence, and the mill where we press still runs to the twelve-hour rule. Whether our house in Dallas is still bringing the oil here in another hundred years is a different question, and honestly not one I think about. What I think about is this year's harvest, and next year's pruning, and the fact that there is a stretch of terraces I have not cleared in five years that I should.
If you are reading this, you are on the list I keep the closest. I will write when there is something worth saying.
— George Maniatis
Dallas, Texas · from the grove, in Kalamata