Our story
One family, one hillside.
The grove
Petalidi, Messinia
The grove faces south, toward the water. Sea breeze in the morning, mountain air at night, and long months of Greek sun in between. Koroneiki has grown on these hillsides for centuries; the variety takes its name from Koroni, a town just down the coast. Its olives are small, barely the size of a marble, and everything the tree draws from this ground ends up concentrated in them. The trees thrive here, and you can taste it in the oil.
The harvest
Picked by hand, in November
We pick in November, while the olives are still green. That is when the polyphenols are at their peak and the flavor at its brightest, and it is also the slowest way to do it: green olives hold tightly to the branch, so each one is taken by hand. The whole family is in the grove for those weeks, and the fruit is handled gently, because a bruised olive begins losing quality before it ever reaches the mill. It's slower work, and worth it.
The press
Cold-pressed, the same day
From tree to mill in hours, never overnight. Heat and delay are the enemies of fresh oil, so the olives are pressed the same day they are picked, at temperatures below 27°C. What comes out is decanted, tasted, and bottled in dark glass to keep the light off. The acidity is verified below 0.8% by an independent laboratory. Nothing added, nothing removed. Just oil and time.
How we got here
First, the trees
Before there was a bottle or a label, there was a grove and the family tending it, one generation handing it to the next.
Taught, not studied
Nobody here learned olives from a book. The work is taught in the grove, season by season, by people who learned it the same way.
Not a factory
Around us, olive oil became an industry: bigger mills, faster machines, oils blended from many places. The family never followed. Staying small was a choice, and the oil is the proof.
A long way from home
It all started as an idea, after the two of us, Alexa and Nikos, met in Prague and got talking about olive oil, and about how we might bring the taste of Greece beyond its borders.
EPIA
So we began to sell the oil Nikos' family presses. The only new thing is the label; what is in the bottle is the oil we cook with ourselves, sent from Petalidi to kitchens far from the grove.