Olive oil tasting

When we decided that we are going to Greece for vacation, first thing came to our mind is olives! Apparently Greece is 3rd largest producer of olive oil in the world. I expected it to be first though:( Having a son who can eat just olives for breakfast, lunch and dinner, it is mandatory now we do an olive tasting trip.

Unfortunately, olive season starts in October where they start harvesting. We could not go for olive tasting, but we found a place for olive oil tasting in Governors Olive mill, Corfu. We were so excited to see how oil is extracted from the mill and assumed there is going to be a big machineries we can see. It was an adventurous journey from our hotel to the mill. Although my soulmate managed to do left hand driving there, it was difficult to manoeuvre spontaneously. We lost the wifi connection to heighten the difficulty. My job was to look at the satnav and direct him. Without wifi, we were struggling for a while. My spouse have the idea to navigate with the combination of greyed out route from satnav and the road signs. It turned out to be a success and we managed to reach the destination on time.

We had a wonderful welcome from the owner of the mill. There were a couple of other German families. That place looked small and I was blank with no idea of what to expect. His name is Spiros which we can never forget mostly because of the way he introduced himself (He hinted well before that is the most used named in Greek)! Before we entered into the Olive mill , he did a speech for about 30 minutes about the Greek culture and history of olives in Greece. Usually I would be very tired hearing just a 30 minutes of speech. But the way he narrated about Greece and olives was impressive. Although he was not showing any machineries or other tools at that point, he articulated in a way he took us to the process in our imagination. It was wonderful to know how much passion and hard work is put into the process. I understood olive oil is not something that can be produced through out the year! It has to be harvested and oil is immediately extracted after few hours of harvesting. They have to wait patiently until the right time to harvest the olives. It is wonderful to see their passion and how they treat the olive trees personally. Apparently some olive trees may not produce olives every year, if not this year it will product next year. But they don't give up on the tree and give ample time to produce olives. It's lovely to see how they appreciate and live with nature instead of rushing things and adding foreign bodies to fasten the process. It was simply awesome to learn the hard work and emotions behind it.

Finally after all the demonstrations, we tasted some amazing olive oil. We were served with a version just one stage before it becomes a proper olive oil. I would describe it as bitter, spicy and fruity. But when added with bread or other food, it tastes amazing. We tried some unique combinations like with yogurt and marmalade, chocolate and of course with bread. We loved it. My favourite one is with bread.