A Swedish home for a Greek family's olive oil

Aegean Heritage is run by Alexander Exintaris and his father George. George is Greek — a career chef with decades in professional kitchens and an expert's eye for extra virgin olive oil: the grades, the varietals, the harvest window, the way a good oil should feel on the back of the tongue. Alexander is half-Swedish, half-Greek, and runs the day-to-day of the business in Sweden.

We started Aegean Heritage to bring the olive oil we grew up with — the kind made properly, by people we know — to Swedish and Scandinavian kitchens. Most of what is sold here as "Greek" or "Mediterranean" olive oil is blended, anonymous, without a story. We wanted the opposite: one estate, one family, and a line you can trace from grove to table.

Between October and January, the olives are picked by hand. Trees are kept low and pruned with the picker in mind, so every fruit can be chosen rather than shaken loose. Nets are spread beneath the branches, combs work the fruit down without bruising, and the olives are gathered into woven sacks at the end of each tree.

Evangelos Dimarakis, who runs the estate and is also its agronomist, walks the groves during harvest and checks the fruit himself. From picking to pressing, the window is twenty-four hours. That is what protects the aroma and the sharp green character of a fresh oil — the part of the process that is hardest to do at scale, which is why most of the world's olive oil doesn't.

Every product we sell comes from a single family estate: Hermes Dimarakis, in Ermioni on the eastern coast of the Peloponnese. It is not a supplier relationship — we are related. The estate was founded in 1970 as an olive mill, began packaging for the Greek market in 1983, and has been exporting since 1999 to nine countries and counting. Aegean Heritage is its route into Sweden and the rest of Scandinavia.

The ground it sits on matters. This is Kranidi — a Protected Designation of Origin for olive oil — and olives have been pressed here for a very long time. Fossils turn up in the nearby Frachti cave dating to around 5000 BC. In 200 AD, the geographer Pausanias wrote that the olive trade was the main source of income for the town. Ermioni itself is the mythological birthplace of the god Hermes, which is where the estate takes its name.