In this installment
Navarino Icons Olive Oil
Captain Vassilis Constantakopoulos was born in 1935 in the small village of Diavolitsi, in Messenia in southwestern Greece – due north of Kalamata and roughly due east of Sicily. As a young boy, he was forced to leave the village for Athens during the Greek Civil War in the late 1940s. From the port of Piraeus, he first went to sea at just 13 years old. Constantakopoulos fell in love with the ocean almost immediately. He eventually became one of Greece’s most prominent businessmen, with much of his career devoted to shipping, sailing, and the seacoast. Navarino became one of the crowning achievements of that long and inventive career. Today, it’s a leading sustainable resort in the Mediterranean, with environmental stewardship at the heart of its mission. Between 2019 and 2022, they cut carbon emissions by 80%, while nearly 10% of their annual spending goes toward ecological improvements across the operation.
The Navarino Icons side of the business fits especially well with our longtime focus here at Zingerman’s on traditional, full-flavored foods. Their products, which they describe as, “Authentic food products inspired by the culinary history of the Peloponnese region,” reflect Captain Constantakopoulos’ desire to preserve and celebrate the simple, delicious country cooking he knew growing up. Everything is produced with regional recipes and locally sourced ingredients.
We’ve been lucky enough to get our hands on some of their limited-edition, single-estate extra virgin olive oil. It’s produced from Koroneiki olives, a much-loved variety native to Greece. The trees are organically farmed without the use of chemicals, and every olive is hand-picked. That process is extremely labor-intensive and expensive, but the care shows in the finished oil. The olives are pressed at a nearby mill within two hours of being harvested. That remarkably short journey from tree to press plays an important role in preserving the oil’s exceptional quality.
The bottle is rustic yet refined, just like the oil. The flavor is fantastic. Bitter but fun, grassy yet rich and full with a mouthfeel like soft satin. It’s one of the most luxurious extra virgin olive oils I’ve tasted in recent memory, yet it ended with a peppery cough that showed it was anything but dainty or precious.
Are greener olive oils fruitier in flavor?
Well, sometimes. Greener oils can be fruitier and fuller flavored. But flavor—not color—is the way to determine which oil you want to buy. In fact, technical experts often pour oils into cobalt blue glasses for tasting so that their assessment won’t be thrown off by the appearance of the oil. Not only is color not directly linked to quality, there are actually ways in which unscrupulous producers use color to mislead well-meaning consumers. By adding olive leaves in with the fruit during the crushing, you can obtain a greener oil—the chlorophyll in the leaves adds visual luster but does nothing to boost the flavor. (Worse, it may even help to mask defects in the flavor of the oil.)