Unfiltered Koroneiki Olive Oil from a 300-Year-Old Cretan Grove
eliato
Natural Koroneiki olive oil from our 300-year-old family grove in Mirabello Bay, Crete
Shop NowELIATO is a small family producer of single-estate extra virgin olive oil from the Kritsa Valley above Mirabello Bay, on the eastern side of Crete. Our oil is made from the olives of one grove — "Działka Tomka" — which has been in the family for generations and contains trees that are over 300 years old. Single-estate means exactly that: every bottle of ELIATO comes from this one grove, never blended with oil from elsewhere.
Kritsa is a mountain village a short drive inland from Agios Nikolaos. The grove sits in the foothills below, where the Lasithi mountains meet the bay — a Mediterranean microclimate of strong sun, cool nights, and porous limestone soil that drains quickly. Olive trees have been farmed in this valley since the Bronze Age; the same conditions that produced oil for the Minoan palaces still produce ours today.
We farm in the traditional way: no chemical fertilisers, no pesticides, no herbicides. The trees are fed by rain and the centuries of leaf-fall mulch beneath them; weeding is done by hand or by sheep. We are not certified organic — small Cretan family producers rarely are, because the certification cost is significant for a single grove — but the practice is the same. The grove relies on the variety (Koroneiki tolerates dry summers extremely well) and on careful soil management rather than chemistry.
Olives are picked by hand at the moment of full maturity and transported within hours to the local Kritsa cooperative mill. There they are cold-pressed at low temperature — below 27°C — on ALFA LAVAL centrifugal equipment. The mill is certified to ISO 9001 and HACCP (ISO 22000:2005). Because the oil never sees high heat, chemical solvents, or long delays between harvest and pressing, it retains its natural polyphenol content and the fruity, peppery character that defines a high-quality early-harvest Cretan oil.
The grove takes its name — "Działka Tomka", "Tomek's plot" in Polish — from the founder. ELIATO began as a project to bring the oil from the family grove to a wider audience in the UK, where good single-estate Greek olive oil is still rare on supermarket shelves. We sell directly from the grove to the customer, with no distributor in between, which is why a small premium producer can offer competitive pricing on a 500ml bottle.