Thank you for opening this.
The Field Dispatch is a letter I write from the grove and from Dallas, roughly once a month, more often during harvest. It is not a blog in the usual sense, though it lives on our website at /blogs/field-dispatch. The letters are about our olive oil and the grove it comes from and the mill it passes through on the way to America, and occasionally about the cooking we do in Greece and the cooking I have learned to do in Texas and the difference between the two.
If you are on our email list, each new post is also sent to your inbox. If you would rather check the site, the letters live here. If you would rather read at your own pace, ignoring both, that is also fine; the letters are evergreen, and nothing I write will expire.
What to expect
Roughly four kinds of letter:
- Harvest updates. Mid-November through early February, from the grove in Kalamata and the mill in Trikorfo. These are the most time-specific letters, and the ones that will be pinned at the top of your inbox.
- Kitchen notes. Short essays on how to cook with and serve a bottle of high-polyphenol Greek olive oil. Accessible; specific; not recipe-books.
- Field reports. Longer, less regular essays on place — on Messinia, on Kalamata, on the history of Koroneiki cultivation, on things that are too long to fit on a product page and too peripheral to put on the About.
- Table letters. Personal notes from me, when I have something to say about the business that does not fit the other three categories.
I aim for one letter a month in a normal season, two a month in November and December, and none in August when we are all traveling. You can unsubscribe from every letter in any of your inboxes at any time, which is the only way this exchange can be honest.
Why “Field Dispatch”
A field is both a grove and a place where work happens, and a dispatch is a short letter from somewhere specific to somewhere else. The letters are not essays. They are not Instagram captions. They are dispatches — literal communications from a field in Greece to a reader in America who agreed to receive them.
I borrowed the name from another family-run olive oil brand I admire, Fat Gold, in California, which sends something they call a Field Report. If you have not read theirs, I recommend it: fat.gold/field-report. Our letter owes the format some conceptual debt. Our voice and subject matter are distinct.
One small ask
If you read something here that moves you, or that is genuinely useful in your kitchen, or that reminds you of your own grandmother's cooking — tell me. Write back. This letter comes from an address that reads replies. The number of readers who write back is small enough that I read every one, and I try to respond within a few weeks, slower during harvest.
The next letter will be soon.
— George Maniatis
Dallas, Texas · from the grove, in Kalamata