About us
Aleco’s Organic Extra Virgin Olive Oil is the product of first cold pressing of organic unblended Koroneiki olives.
Koroneiki olives are native to Messinia, Greece, they thrive in coastal, mountainous areas, and famously have afantastically low acidity. Our olive oil has an average acidity of just 0.3% though the most recent harvest was just 0.2%.
Our family re-located to the Peloponnese, and we were immediately immersed in the culture of olive oil. We learnt everything from our neighbours and from Aleco who runs the village press. People loved this oil; everyone seemed to be so genuinely happy when they tasted it. Local farmers in the area are starting to go organic, and we were keen to share what is undoubtedly a fantastically natural extra virgin olive oil, without any of the blending so prevalent in the international olive oil industry. Our intention is to support small-scale village producers, whose way of life is otherwise coming under threat with ruthless competition from international large scale industrialised production, and to work together to share a real olive oil at a reasonable price, exposing how an ethically-produced Greek extra virgin olive oil can - and should - taste.
Aleco’s Organic is the fruit of a small network of very small-scale organic farmers from Messinia, in the Western Peloponnese region of Greece. The oil we work with is pretty much the same thing the ancient Greeks would have consumed. The process of picking and pressing is also essentially the same; we harvest the olives by hand, press the olives within a day of being picked, use cold water to process the olives, so absolutely no degradation happens to the fruit, and the truly cold pressed result is as fresh as possible; the oil speaks for itself once you taste it.
Unlike the vast majority of olive oils, ours is completely unblended, meaning that the olives themselves are a single variety (koroneiki).
We pride ourselves on working with our friends, producing olive oil which tastes as good as that of our childhood…
pure cold-pressed extra virgin liquid gold… and you can taste the difference!
We produce organic because we believe in farming sustainably, using no pesticides or artificial fertilisers, maintaining wildlife habitats around the groves, harvesting rainwater, recycling, composting and always reusing. Our olive grove is our home, and we love living here. It makes no sense to treat our land with anything but respect and gratitude.
With this oil we want to share the fruits of our labour at a realistic price, without too much fuss and fancy packaging; we’re keen to create a network of small businesses who think similarly about food and its relation to our health and the environment, in order to share our oil with people who think that sustainably-minded farming, and health-conscious living should be the norm!
