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Why you should start your day with a spoonful of this Greek olive oil

“For us, it’s medicine,” says Konstantina Natioti from Liotrivi Estate. And for just $284, you can adopt one of their trees and have its oil shipped to your Australian home.

The olive grove at Liotrivi Estate is a delightful setting in which to taste and learn everything about the produce. 

Jane CornwellContributor

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In an olive grove on a hillside on an island off the east coast of the Peloponnese peninsula stands a tree called the Mother of Democracy.

Warmed by the sun, watered by the rain, gnarled and thickened by time, its properties are multifarious and, if the Greek gods are to be believed, even miraculous.

The goddess Athena’s offering of the olive tree was deemed to be a gift for humankind, hence she became patron of the region’s city, naming it after herself and planting the first olive tree on the Acropolis. 

“And I will give you the olive tree,” Athena allegedly cried in her face-off with Poseidon, striking a sacred rock at the Acropolis with her spear and, whoosh!, creating an olive tree not dissimilar to this one.

“Eat its fruit. Find shade under its leaves. Use its wood for fuel.” That was just for starters.

“Pure olive oil can lower blood pressure, protect the bones,” says Konstantina Natioti as she takes olives from one of Liotrivi’s trees. 

Here in Velies (population 400), a traditional village 15 kilometres from the town of Monemvasia – founded in the sixth century, complete with a medieval stone fortress perched atop its rocky backdrop – olives are prized for their health benefits.

Hippocrates, the father of modern medicine, prescribed their antioxidant-rich oil for some 60 medical conditions, so it’s probably no wonder every resident of Velies seems to be glowing.

“All my family begin their day with a spoonful of olive oil on an empty stomach. We use nothing but olive oil in our cooking, never butter or animal fats,” says Konstantina Natioti, 41 (she could pass for 30), standing by the Mother of Democracy with a rake in one hand and a basket in the other.

“For us, it is medicine. Science has said that pure olive oil can lower blood pressure, protect the bones, reduce the risk of cancer and diabetes. It speeds weight loss, and is especially good for women when they are not so young any more. Importantly, it fights inflammation in our bodies with its bitterness; the better the olive oil is, the higher it ranks in natural compounds called polyphenols.

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“Ours is not the bland yellow olive oil of supermarkets,” she continues, climbing a ladder to comb ripe olives from the tree’s branches.

“Fresh olive oil is a living product and is deep green and cloudy – the fresher the better. We have four different varieties and all of them are thriving.”

Natioti, left, says she takes a spoonful of olive oil every day. 

Our small group is standing on the Liotrivi Estate, an organic farm with a Byzantine stone mansion that more recently belonged to the family of 20th-century Greek poet Yiannis Ritsos. The family sold it to Natioti’s grandfather in 1929, after which it was converted into an olive mill.

Following decades of disuse the mill is now a working museum containing stone wheels, cast-iron presses and wooden tools.

It takes 30 kilos of olives to make one litre of the best extra virgin olive oil you will ever taste.

Konstantina Natioti, Liotrivi Estate.

There is also an indoor restaurant with a fine wine list, an outdoor restaurant with a stone oven (we get a sourdough baking demo) and a shop selling jams and honey, olive paste, olive oil and, well, olives.

A manicured lawn dotted with flowering lemon and lime trees surrounds a clutch of boutique-style two-storey accommodation. And all around are olive trees, their bushy green leaves fluttering in the breeze to offer glimpses of an azure Myrtoan Sea.

Bread is baked on the premises. Daniella – who makes all the preserves – takes loaves out of the oven.  

There are some 3000 of them, winding in rows, some with a name tag dangling from a lower branch: Merlin; Popeye; Grapes of Wrath. These are the olive trees sponsored (and named) under Liotrivi’s Adopt an olive tree project, which was founded by Natioti’s cousin, Kyriakos Klapsis, in 2016.

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“Kyriakos wanted our visitors to know more about olive tree cultivation in our area,” says Natioti of the Peleponnese peninsula’s Laconia region and its innumerable olive estates. Monemvasia is connected to the mainland via a 200-metre causeway and while inaccessible to cruise ships, it can be reached by smaller boats or yachts from the mainland and the Cyclades islands to the west.

“We have the perfect combination of factors for growing olives: sunlight, rain, gentle wind. Birds that fertilise the soil with the pits and leaves. We have time and patience,” she adds.

Some of the old tools inside the working museum at Liotrivi Estate. 

Natioti gives the trunk of the Mother of Democracy – as named by its adoptive family in the United States – a pat.

“We live the way our ancestors lived. We don’t harm the olives with pesticides or mechanical means as they do with the man-made common varieties, which need just four to seven kilos of olives for one litre of olive oil.

“Most of these wild olive trees are hundreds of years old.” She sweeps an arm around the estate.

“It takes 30 kilos of their olives to make one litre of the best extra virgin olive oil you will ever taste; sweet and mild on your tongue at first then after a few moments, it turns very sharp.”

Liotrivi’s popular olive oil tastings, and picnic excursions to a nearby dry river bed filled with the ruins of an old watermill, have convinced visitors from Europe, the United States, Australia and South Korea to adopt.

You can even adopt your own olive tree, as did a couple from Texas. 

A yearly fee of €178 (about $284) includes five litres of olive oil shipped to your door, digital photos of your named tree through the seasons and the chance to visit Liotrivi during the harvest period (November 15 to January 15) and assist in raking the olives off their branches.

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You can also give your olive tree a hug.

In the indoor restaurant, we dip pieces of sourdough into the estate’s four olive oils – Athenoelia, Koroneiki, Myrtolia and a Laconian blend – and on the printouts provided, award marks out of 10 for aroma, fruitiness, bitterness and the distinctive peppery taste of polyphenol antioxidants.

A range of olive oils in different volumes from Liotrivi Estate. 

We score each oil highly before being presented with a bowl of ordinary supermarket-style olive oil. We dip and wait. Nothing. There’s no smell, no taste, no aftertaste except for a vaguely artificial one. We grimace, and Natioti raises an eyebrow.

“Now you see,” she says.

The writer travelled to Greece aboard Le Ponant, as a guest of Ponant.

Need to know

  • Online | You can order or adopt an olive tree online, just go to liotrivi.shop, or tel +30 2732 061 391.
  • Visit | Liotrivi Organic Farm can be found at Monemvasia-Velies in Laconia, Greece.
  • Cruise | For a Greek sailing, try Ponant’s 8-night Cruising the Greek islands of the southern Aegean, priced from $8320 per person. Multiple departures this year; tel 1300 737 178.

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Jane CornwellContributorJane Cornwell is a London-based contributor.

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