Claudia: We're in Kalamata
in the Peloponnese, Greece.
This region produces what is considered to be
the finest olive oil in the world.
It's made from this olive right here, the Koroneiki.
It is a very small olive,
but also very rich and aromatic.
Thanks to a cold extraction
and a slow fermentation process,
Koroneiki olive oil tastes like no other —
a true nectar of the gods.
This is the land of ancient myths and heroes, after all.
This olive oil is considered a very bitter,
very spiced olive oil.
Very intense, grassy, fruity,
and that is what makes Koroneiki very special.
Like, the aromas of that and the spiciness,
the intense character it has.
Claudia: This region has a mild Mediterranean climate
with extended periods of sunshine,
which makes it the ideal home for olive groves.
Koroneiki olives are harvested
from late October until late January.
The best olive oil is considered to be
the one extracted from the olives
harvested in the first three weeks,
when they're bright green.
Early-harvest olive oil is more nutritious.
It is rich in polyphenols and antioxidants,
which make the flavor fresher and more intense.
As the olives ripen, they do not really get any bigger,
but they will get darker.
These ripe olives contain more oil than the green ones
and will give a larger yield,
but their oil has a milder flavor.
To preserve the nutrients inside the Koroneiki olive,
the harvest happens as fast as possible.
There are two methods.
One is to shake the olives
out of the tree with these electric sticks.
Dimitra: See, now they just brush the olives.
The olive fall, and they do not hurt the tree.
Claudia: And it's only the olives that are ready
to fall that actually come down?
They do everything.
So basically they go through the tree.
Some of them are more ripe.
Some of them are more green.
We need them both.
We need them both to be harvested. All of them.
Claudia: Ah, this one. Yeah?
Whoa! And so I — oh, OK!
Need to do this job with goggles or something.
Ah!
It's, uh, let's see.
Another method is to prune all the inside branches
and then collect the olives
with the help of this machine,
which filters out the leaves.
So, the olives feed inside this.
There's olives falling.
Be careful, be careful.
Claudia: It's raining olives.
Dimitra: Yeah, it's raining olives.
Dimitra: Bravo, like this. Claudia: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
With both methods, the olives fall into a net,
which is made of breathable material
to avoid compressing the olives.
The net is then closed
and the more stubborn branches and leaves
are taken out by hand.
Dimitra: Like, fast, fast.
It's like brushing them.
Yes, yes, yes.
Claudia: So, how many olives do you put in one sack?
Dimitra: 50 kilos of olives in one sack.
Claudia: Wow.
Dimitra: And from that, you get 10 kilos of olive oil.
OK. Scratch the olive.
Squeeze it to find the olive oil inside.
Now look, this is the olive oil.
Claudia: Oh, look!
It's actually whiter. Yeah, of course,
because it's mixed with some pulp, yeah.
Dimitra: And smell it.
Fresh?
Nice.
Dimitra: This is the fresh grass that we're looking for
in the fresh olive oil. Exactly that sensation,
that you just have cracked the olive and find the aroma.
Claudia: Oh, yeah. There's so much juice
inside the olive itself. Can we taste it?
Dimitra: No, they're very bitter.
They are.
They are very bitter.
But it's still nice.
The Koroneiki olive has a sister, Kalamata.
Both varieties are important
for the life of the olive grove.
Dimitra: This is really good for
the pollination of the trees.
Also, think of tradition.
People produced what they needed for the house.
So they needed both Kalamata olives and olive oil.
Claudia: Because of their bitterness,
Kalamata olives are not turned into olive oil.
They are instead used as table olives
and go through a debittering process:
They are cured in brine,
then vinegar,
and then stored in jars with Koroneiki olive oil.
We have more than 2,000 olive trees.
Some of them are 1,000 years old.
We are very connected with the olive trees.
Every family has 200 trees, 300 trees.
It is their olive oil for the family,
even though they are not farmers.
And it's also for them an extra income.
Claudia: Together with extracting the oil
from her family's groves,
Dimitra will usually work
with local families to extract their own oil.
Her mill is actually paid in olive oil by these families,
as it keeps 8% of the production.
More than 1,000 sacks arrive every day
during peak harvest at Dimitra's mill.
The oil is extracted within 24 hours.
After this machine blows the leaves out,
the olives are washed.
This is an important step
to remove any soil that may be in the olives
that would give the oil an earthy taste.
There is also a scale here to weigh the olives
and see what percentage of olive oil is extracted from them.
We need to weigh the olives
to see how many olives every family has brought.
Usually for the Koroneiki variety,
when it's early harvest, about 14%.
When it's mid-season, it's about 20%.
Claudia: The olives, including the pits,
are ground into a paste.
The paste ferments and spins for a few minutes
to bring out the aromas of the Koroneiki olive.
Then the temperature cools down really fast
to be able to extract the oil.
Cold extraction means that the olive oil
is produced with olives less than 28 degrees.
Because otherwise you would cook, basically, the —
Exactly, you'd burn the olive oil.
Claudia: Yeah, yeah.
Dimitra: Now we extract the olive oil.
So basically we don't press the olives.
Press is open air.
So now, here we don't want any oxygen.
Press is human touch.
We don't want that.
Claudia: The extraction of the olive oil
happens in this machine here in just 15 minutes.
It works like a big centrifuge to separate the solids,
like the paste, the pit, and the flesh,
from the liquid, which is our olive oil.
The process is very fast.
From their arrival, olives are turned into oil
in less than 45 minutes.
The liquid gold that comes out is extra-virgin olive oil,
the finest grade in the family of olive oils.
Extra-virgin means that the cold extraction
has preserved all the antioxidants
and polyphenols present in the Koroneiki olive,
like cheese made with raw milk.
Olive oil is also measured
by a parameter called free acidity.
For extra-virgin,
the free acidity must be 0.8% or less,
meaning than less than 0.8%
of the fatty acids normally present in olive oil
have been damaged, either in production or storage.
Extra-virgin olive oil is more nutritious
but also has a shorter shelf life compared to other grades.
We have the liquids,
and now we have to separate the liquids.
There is some water that's naturally inside the olive oil.
Again, it's a second centrifugation.
At this time it's vertical.
Olive oil is light; goes on the surface.
Water is heavy; goes down.
And like this, naturally, they are separated.
Claudia: Olive oil is stored
in 300-ton stainless-steel tanks.
When not full, the tanks are filled with nitrogen.
In fact, light, oxygen, and temperature
are the worst enemies of olive oil.
Unlike wine, there is no such thing as aging in the bottle.
Olive oil is only bottled when needed.
Dimitra's mill produces more than 600 tanks
of olive oil every year.
This is my office.
Your olive mill, yeah.
The traditional olive-oil mill.
So, it was in 1904
that the olive-oil mill started working.
And my husband now is the
fifth-generation owner of the olive-oil mill.
Claudia: Oh, wow. So this is how it was originally?
Dimitra: This is the family.
So this is my father-in-law.
In that photo, he's 4.
Claudia: He's the small one?
Dimitra: Yeah, the small boys, 4 years old.
Now he's 74.
OK, you are very lucky,
because this is the early-harvest olive oil
harvested 10 days ago.
So this is as fresh as you can get it. OK?
This is the Koroneiki variety.
This is from our own land, family estate.
I want you to take your hand like this.
Close it
and cover it.
And let's roll it a bit.
Usually when we taste the olive oils,
we taste them in 28 degrees.
This is the perfect temperature,
because you have the aromas of the olive oil.
You feel them. OK?
Extra-virgin olive oil has three characteristics.
No. 1 is fruitiness.
Fruitiness, you can only sense it with your nose.
And fruitiness has a scale from 0 to 10
by the national standards.
Let's put our nose in.
Oh.
I could put this on my bedside table.
Fruity, fresh.
The Koroneiki variety
has the fresh-cut grass as a characteristic.
Yeah. It smells exactly like that.
This is a fruitiness around 6, 6.5.
And then what are the other two characteristics?
Bitter. You feel it here,
right and left part of your tongue.
And spicy. You feel it here when you swallow your olive oil.
[sucks in]
[Claudia coughs] [both laugh]
Dimitra: That was the spicy!
So is that movement you do, the [sucks in] —
The oxygen.
Yeah, to sort of make the olive oil —
Dimitra: Breathe, yes, yes. Claudia: Breathe.
So this is when you want oxygen.
Dimitra: Exactly. Claudia: This is the only time
where you need a little bit of it.
Yeah, yeah.
You want fresh green mouth.
Not to be disturbing. You're not feeling bad.
Good-quality bread, good-quality olive oil
really make me blessed.
Make me feel really good.
So nice. Well, you are definitely blessed,
to be doing this.
I love it. I love it.
Dimitra: Messinia is an endless olive garden,
as far as you can see.
People of this land were called helots.
Helots means slaves.
They were not really slaves, but they were not fighting.
They were producing the food of the area.
That's why Euripides has called this land as Kallikarpos.
Kalli, good.
Karpos, seed, fruit.
So this is the land of the good fruit.
Claudia: Good seeds.
Dimitra: Good seeds, good fruits.
Claudia: Yeah, it is.