Cretan Labyrinth Extra Virgin Olive oil has an identity. Its DNA embodies the sweat and labor of not just the people that produced this year’s harvest, but also the sweat and labor of their parents, their grandparents and their great-grandparents before them. The olives are harvested strictly in the Kolympari region of Western Crete. The olive fruit belongs exclusively to the Koroneiki variety. Picking of the olives is done solely by hand, no machines involved here as the vibrations these generate could bruise the olive which would in turn raise the acidity of the oil. Olives are then packed loose, transferred to the mill and pressed in under 24 hours, usually the very same night of the picking. So far everything is done the same way it has been done for millennia. We have done our best to keep the whole process from tree to bottle as traditional and authentic as possible, however there are certain aspects of the work that we must admit have benefited from the technological advances of the modern age. Whilst the picking process remains virtually indistinguishable from the way it was done 5,000 years ago, when it comes to pressing the olives to extract their precious juice, we have come to realize that modern-day centrifugal machines are more caring to the extraction process while at the same time managing to squeeze out larger quantities of the valuable oil.
Even using state-of-the-art machines however is not enough to guarantee that you will be producing top quality oil. We make sure that all relevant milling equipment and olive presses are meticulously cleaned and maintained throughout the year as well as in between bottling runs. We also make sure that the olive paste (which is created once the olives are ground to a paste, but before it is pressed into oil) temperature never exceeds 27 degrees Celsius (80o F) at any point during the extraction process as this could result in oil that has lost some of its most valuable antioxidant properties. Finally, we perform the bottling process in a semi-automated, controlled and sterilized environment conforming to the industry’s highest standards. More importantly, we guarantee that the extraction process is executed using solely mechanical means just like our ancestors did. Not a lot of modern-day oils can make the same claim, unfortunately a lot of competitors use industrial strength solvents during the milling process, in their quest to extract as much oil as possible from the fruit, but, at the same time contaminating the extracted oil with chemicals. Unfortunately, due to shortcomings in legislation as well as inefficient regulations a lot of them get away with it.
