Olive oil at Lino Cambi.
The grove was here before the house. It was planted by Barba Gapio of the Zeakis family, the uncle who held this land before the keys passed to his nephew. The grove presses its first oil every November. Some of that oil reaches our table. Some of it reaches our spa.
The grove.
The trees are old enough that nobody alive remembers them being planted. Barba Gapio — Agapitos the elder, called by everyone on the coast by his diminutive — set them in the ground in another generation. His wife Dimytra walked between the rows with him for sixty years. The land was theirs to keep, not theirs to own. Olive trees on Crete are usually older than the family that tends them, and that is the case here too.
The grove is small by any commercial measure. A few hundred trees, terraced into the slope between the cliff edge and the road behind us. Some of them are the silvery tsounati variety native to western Crete; some are the larger koroneiki. Each tree has its own shape and yield. None of them produce on a schedule the way industrial groves do.
The harvest.
Late October to late November on the south coast. The picking is done by hand — the nets are spread under each tree, the branches are combed with wooden rakes, and the fruit falls into the nets. It is heavy, slow, communal work. The family does some of it. Neighbours do some of it. Founding guests staying through harvest week are welcome at the grove, and many end up working.
The fruit is sorted in baskets and taken the same day to the press in the village down the road. Speed matters — the fewer hours between picking and pressing, the brighter the oil. Crete has been doing this for four thousand years and has not found a reason to change the basic method.
The first pressing — agourelaio.
In Greek the first oil of the season is called agourelaio. It comes from olives picked while still partly green, before they have fully ripened to black. The oil is green too — almost the colour of cut grass — bitter on the tongue, peppery at the back of the throat. It is unlike any oil that reaches a supermarket shelf anywhere in the world.
We pour it over warm bread the night it comes home from the press. We pour it over beans the next day. We pour it over the last tomato of the year, the one the kitchen garden kept holding onto past the season. For two weeks in November the whole house smells like just-pressed agourelaio. Then the oil settles, mellows, and becomes the oil that carries us through the year.
The oil at the table.
At Lino Cambi the oil is the foundation of almost every meal. It is the cooking fat, the dressing fat, the finishing drizzle. The Cretan diet — at the centre of longevity research since Ancel Keys's Seven Countries Study in the 1950s — uses olive oil at a quantity that surprises people who learned to cook elsewhere. A quarter cup per person per day is not unusual. The Cretans who lived this way had the lowest cardiovascular disease rate ever documented in the developed world.
Our long-table breakfast carries oil on bread and over yoghurt. Lunch carries it over beans, greens, and grilled vegetables. Dinner carries it as the finishing line of almost every plate. Guests are welcome to take a small bottle home with their name on the label, pressed from the season they were here.
The oil at the spa.
What goes on the inside of the body also goes on the outside, on this coast. Cretan grandmothers warmed olive oil and used it on the skin, the hair, the muscles, the joints. The methods are still here, in the hands of the same women, or their daughters.
At Lino Cambi the spa offers massage with first-press oil, body wraps with warmed oil and Cretan herbs, and scrubs cut with olive-stone meal. All by appointment, one treatment per day included in every stay. The oil on your skin in the afternoon was on a tree above your suite three weeks ago.
Come for the November pressing.
The harvest weeks are the shoulder-season window founding guests will want to know about. Tell us in your inquiry.
Or read on: October in South Crete · The Table · The Spa