Named for Maritsa

Kampia sits at the foot of the Machairas mountains, in the middle of Cyprus. Maritsa was born there, in the house where generations of the family had been born before her, and it was there that she raised her children.

The house still stands. By Greek custom it passed to her daughter.

Her grandchildren remember a caring woman who loved to cook, and whose food was always homemade. She knew good oil when she tasted it: fresh and green, a little bitter, with the peppery catch at the back of the throat that tells you an oil is young.

Her children grew up on that standard. It travelled with them, and long after some of the family had left Kampia for London, and for the restaurant kitchen in Euston that Big K grew out of, they still judged every oil they tasted against hers.

It was her son, Chris, who took the next step. The family had land further down the mountain, with a handful of olive trees on it. He picked them himself, took the fruit to the local mill and brought the oil home in white barrels.

He learned the way the village always had: by watching how the locals made their oil, asking the right questions and reading everything he could. In the early 2000s he planted the land with Koroneiki. The rest, from the press to the bottle, he worked out by trial and error.

Chris has since built a home down by the grove, with a small farm beside it: donkeys, chickens and goats. The house where his mother was born is not far away. Today the family tends 2,500 Koroneiki trees there, watered from their own spring. The olives are picked by hand in December and pressed the same day, and Sofroni, who lives two kilometres from the grove, walks the rows every day.

When the first bottles were filled, there was only ever going to be one name for them. Maritsa is no longer with us. The house is, the trees are, and so is her standard, in every bottle.