Mavroudis

The mill, told properly

Olives and olive oil run through the Mavroudis family the way memory does — grandfather to father to son, without a break, on the same ground in Vraganiotika in southern Corfu. The family tends around 2,000 trees of their own, a good number of them Lianolia Kerkyras, the native variety of the island, and some of those trees the family puts at up to 700 years old. For generations the fruit went through hand methods and animal-powered stone mills before anything changed. In 1992 the family built a modern mill on the same site, the first on the island to press using cold extraction, and started pressing their own harvest along with fruit brought in by roughly 800 other local growers and farmers. The old stone building next to the new mill became a museum, keeping a single grindstone and a wooden double-screw press dating to the mid-16th century, along with the donkey-powered three-stone mill that came after it — a record of how oil was made on Corfu before machines did the work. Their monovarietal Lianolia has since taken Gold at the New York International Olive Oil Competition and Double Gold honors at the Athena International Olive Oil Competition, among other awards collected across the family's gourmet and premium lines.

From the public record: oliveoilcorfu.gr · corfuoliveoilmuseum.com