Olive Auction built this page from public records so buyers can find the estate. Its own people can claim it at no cost — complete the story, list lots, answer buyers.
After a claim, we confirm by emailEverything here comes from public sources — award lists, certification registers, the territory inventories. The rest of the story — the family, the grove, the real age of the trees, this year's lab sheet — only the mill can tell, and it is the part buyers bid on.
The Dafnis family has been pressing olives in Aghios Matthaios, on Corfu's southwest coast, for three generations now — over a hundred years of tending groves through the island's long slide out of the olive business, when by some counts six or seven in ten of Corfu's groves went to neglect as people left for the mainland. What they held onto was Lianolia, a variety that grows almost nowhere outside Corfu and that Venetian planters once used to anchor the island against raiders. Brothers Spyros and George Dafnis took over the family grove around 2010 with roughly two thousand trees that had gone wild and unproductive, some of them, by the family's own account, several centuries old, with one — they call it the mother tree — put at close to fifteen hundred years. They named the resulting oil after Ioannis Kapodistrias, the Corfiot count who became the first governor of independent Greece, and set out to make the first single-variety Lianolia oil the island had ever bottled. Testing at the University of Athens in March 2014, run against seven hundred samples from thirty varieties, put its oleocanthal and oleacein levels at roughly seven times the average. In 2013 The Governor became the first olive oil to carry the EU's health claim label under Regulation 432/2012, and since then it has picked up medals at Terraolivo, the Athena International EVOO Competition, Great Taste, and a string of others, building a name as Corfu's best-known olive oil.
From the public record: thegovernor.gr · greekliquidgold.com
A producer account takes a minute — name, mill, region. We attach this profile the same day.
Lab numbers, tree references, harvest dates, a photo — the tap-through form asks only for what buyers pay for.
Auction with a confidential reserve, or a fixed-price allocation. We review it and it goes live.
The catalogue goes to this list before it goes on the site. When the sale closes you get every hammer price from it — including the ones that disappointed.
Two emails. Then quiet until Sale No. 2.
