Forging a Future for Olive Oil Production on Corfu

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Situated less than 20 kilo­me­ters (12 miles) off the north­west­ern coast of Greece, in the Ionian Sea, the island of Corfu has long been known for its beaches and rich cul­tural her­itage.

And now, an unlikely fam­ily of olive oil pro­duc­ers is also seek­ing to turn the island into a focal point of Greek pro­duc­tion.

Back in the 1950s, Apostolos Kavvadias, an ortho­pe­dic sur­geon in Athens, was look­ing for a new career path and decided to pro­duce olive oil part-time from his cen­te­nary trees on Corfu.

While mus­cu­loskele­tal surgery and olive oil pro­duc­tion may seem worlds apart, Kavvadias brought the same ded­i­ca­tion and method­i­cal plan­ning to both.

The result was the pro­duc­tion of high-qual­ity extra vir­gin olive oil from his Lianelia trees, a feat at odds with the island’s past, where there has never been a note­wor­thy tra­di­tion of olive oil pro­duc­tion.

Kavvadias uti­lized sim­ple meth­ods, includ­ing a tra­di­tional stone press to extract the oil, pos­tu­lat­ing that any added water or the use of a cen­trifu­gal sys­tem would dimin­ish its qual­ity. He also believed that the best crops came from nat­u­rally-grown olive trees.

Kavvadias set the foun­da­tions of Dr. Kavvadia Olive Oil, one of the very few pro­duc­ers in Corfu to enter the illus­tri­ous world of extra vir­gin pro­duc­tion.

These days, Apostolos Porsanidis-Kavvadias, the founder’s grand­son, is behind the com­pany and has taken Dr. Kavvadia from a part-time project to a name to be reck­oned with in the Greek olive oil sec­tor.

“The first dis­tinc­tion for the qual­ity of our extra vir­gin olive oil came in 2013,” Porsanidis-Kavvadias told Olive Oil Times. ​“Then our olive oil qual­i­fied for a European Union health claim for the phe­nols it con­tained.”

“But we could never imag­ine that our organic mono­va­ri­etal olive oil from Lianelia would be the only one from Corfu to earn prizes in sev­eral inter­na­tional com­pe­ti­tions, includ­ing a Gold Award at the pres­ti­gious NYIOOC World Olive Oil Competition in 2018,” he added.

The brand con­tin­ued its win streak with a Silver Award in the 2020 edi­tion of the world’s largest and most pres­ti­gious olive oil qual­ity com­pe­ti­tion.

An indus­trial designer liv­ing and work­ing in Paris, Porsanidis-Kavvadias returned to his ances­tral home in Corfu in 2010, where he took up the man­tle of car­ing for the family’s olive trees and land.

“I had no chance of prac­tic­ing my pro­fes­sion in Greece, so I decided to work with my grand­fa­ther’s olive groves,” Porsanidis-Kavvadias said. ​“We started our com­pany in 2011 and the first quan­ti­ties of olive oil were pro­duced a year later.”

Making head­way in the olive oil indus­try was no walk in the park for Dr. Kavvadia. Corfu was off the map of the olive oil mak­ing ter­ri­to­ries of Greece, and Porsanidis-Kavvadias had no prior expe­ri­ence in grow­ing and har­vest­ing olive trees.

“Back then, pro­duc­ing olive oil in Corfu was like sail­ing into uncharted waters,” he said. ​“In the begin­ning, we were press­ing our olives at the nearby con­vent of Kamarela since there was no sub­stan­tial pro­cess­ing infra­struc­ture on the island. Everybody was laugh­ing at us, say­ing that the island makes the worst olive oil in Greece and that we were doomed to fail.”

“I was com­pletely clue­less about olive trees and olive oil,” he added. ​“I could not even hold a hand pruner straight. After a lot of mis­takes and fail­ures, attend­ing sem­i­nars and read­ing books, trav­el­ing and search­ing on the web, my end­less quest finally made me under­stand how olives and olive oil work.”

Honoring his grandfather’s legacy, Porsanidis-Kavvadias keeps his busi­ness sim­ple and straight­for­ward, apply­ing organic cul­ti­va­tion and gen­tle tech­niques in the field and dur­ing har­vest.

“Organic farm­ing has been the way to go since the begin­ning,” he said. ​“We have also added some ele­ments of per­ma­cul­ture and nat­ural farm­ing. We respect the envi­ron­ment, we never har­row the soil, we cause no destruc­tion. We main­tain a healthy ecosys­tem in our groves so that our olive trees remain healthy and bal­anced, and con­sumers receive a food prod­uct con­tain­ing no pes­ti­cides or chem­i­cal fer­til­iz­ers.”

“Harvest begins in October and lasts until mid-November,” he added. ​“We use some elec­tri­cal equip­ment, and of course our hands. The olives are put in plas­tic crates for the air to cir­cu­late and the olive oil extrac­tion process takes place daily and within hours from har­vest to achieve top qual­ity.”

The result is a medium fruity, medium bit­ter, and medium pun­gent extra vir­gin olive oil, car­ry­ing an E.U. health claim for its polyphe­nol con­tent, which plays an impor­tant part in pro­tect­ing blood lipids from oxida­tive stress.

Despite some draw­backs in the local olive oil sec­tor, Kavvadia is ready to make a big leap for­ward by expand­ing the company’s facil­i­ties and adding a new olive vari­ety to its arse­nal.

“Until recently, no one in Corfu pro­duced qual­ity olive oil and the tech­niques and knowl­edge on har­vest­ing and milling the olives were out­dated,” Porsanidis-Kavvadias said.

“We are in the process of cre­at­ing a multi-func­tional estate with an agri-tourist estab­lish­ment at our home base of Tzavros vil­lage, includ­ing a new pro­cess­ing and bot­tling unit to have com­plete con­trol over pro­duc­tion,” he added. ​“We have also come across another native olive vari­ety of Corfu, Thiako, which pro­duces olive oil with fruity notes and a great fla­vor and we intend to mar­ket it.”

Dr. Kavvadia Olive Oil plans ahead and respects its ori­gins, using a native olive vari­ety to deliver top-qual­ity olive oil with spe­cial traits that exem­plify the ter­roir of Corfu.

“My grand­fa­ther believed as a physi­cian that when the high­est qual­ity olive oil is pro­duced cor­rectly, it is as good as med­i­cine,” Porsanidis-Kavvadias said. ​“Dr. Kavvadia Olive Oil is a prod­uct of pas­sion and love. It is pro­duced from a rare olive vari­ety, it is unusu­ally rich in polyphe­nols and ben­e­fi­cial to our health. On top of that, it tastes amaz­ing.”