The Greek Olive Estate

The mill, told properly

Costas Mathiopoulos came home to Kato Rizospilia in 2012, a small village in Gortynia, in the Arcadian mountains of the Peloponnese, and started bottling the oil from the groves around it. The village sits on the Alfeios river valley, along a route travelers used on the way to Olympia since ancient times, and olives had been grown there long before the estate had a name. Back in 2010, before the estate was founded, a batch of the family's oil had come back from testing with a number nobody expected: polyphenol readings dozens of times higher than the region's oils were assumed to carry. That sent the family chasing the source instead of writing it off as a fluke, and by 2016 they had produced an oil the World Olive Center for Health measured at over 3,000 mg/kg total polyphenols by NMR spectroscopy, among the highest figures ever recorded for the category. The same oils read lower under HPLC, the more common standardized method — closer to 1,300 mg/kg in the producer's published analyses, which tracks with how differently the two techniques count phenolic compounds. The results kept coming year after year: the estate has taken the top polyphenol prize at the Olympia Health & Nutrition Awards in four of the last seven years. The flagship bottling, Drop of Life Limited Reserve, comes from Olympia-variety trees picked early, in September and October, before the fruit ripens past the point where those compounds are at their strongest.

From the public record: thegreekoliveestate.com · worldolivecenter.com