Olive Oil and Honey Tasting at a Microfarm

Booking

Walking and tasting tours are on Saturday and Sunday and can be booked through lefkadamicrofarm.gr

You have to text the owner, Andreas, via WhatsApp to make a reservation. He’s a nice, friendly guy and will also be giving the tour.

Getting There

We had a moped and had no problem getting up the pave mountain roads to the location, which is easy to find on Google maps. There’s also a sign with the Micro Farm logo on the driveway you need to turn in to.

We were a little bit early and Andreas arrived right on time. We waited around for ten minutes for the other visitors to arrive, and Andreas talked to us, introduced us to his dog and cat, and gave us water while we waited.

The Tour

The tour lasted about an hour and we walked around while he described the different vegetables and trees growing on his property. He was really open to questions and very knowledgeable about his craft.

In particular, we learned about the different kinds of olive trees, the health benefits of olive oil, and the processing and sales systems that makes it so difficult to get high-quality olive oil to consumers.

He also wanted us to do some hands-on gardening to better understand agriculture, so I got to pick a head of lettuce and some peppers right from the garden. We fed the lettuce to his goats and ate the peppers later.

The Tasting

After the tour he took us to his farm kitchen, where he cut the vegetables we picked and we got more water.

He brought out three kinds of olive oil and three kinds of honey.

The olive oil tasting proceeded like a wine tasting, with little cups for us to drink and savor. We had a the typical processed olive oil from a grocery store, a higher quality olive oil, and then an even higher quality olive oil.

I learned two new things: 1) the best olive oils should be a little spicy 2) one way consumers can tell good olive oil from bad is by seeing how far into the future the expiration date is. Six months is the best, a year and a half is good, and more than that the seller doesn’t care about quality. Ideally there’s a production date on the bottle instead though.

As someone who cooks a lot with olive oil, that’s useful knowledge! And I could definitely taste the difference between the three selections.

The we went on to three different honeys, with one commercial, processed honey and two high quality honeys from the local area. One was from the arbutus unedo plant, a shrub that grows strawberry-like fruit native to the Mediterranean Basin. This was such an unusual, slightly bitter, sort of crunchy honey. I really liked it.

Andreas said honey was a great way to get the flavor of Greece and I completely agree! High-quality single-origin honey is so special and I enjoy trying local varieties when I travel.

Ending the Tour

Andreas showed us his shop of curated herbs, honeys, and olive oil. I wish I could’ve bought some of the olive oil and honey but unfortunately Sev and I don’t have any checked bags so couldn’t transport them on the airplane. We did get some tea leaves though which were very nice!

Overall this was a really unique and interesting experience, and it was exciting to talk to such a knowledgable and nice person who is really passionate about the important issue of sustainable agriculture. I’ll be thinking about the lessons I learned about olive oil for all my future purchases!