The day you pick decides everything

October 12 2026
3 min reading time

Every autumn our producer gets a few weeks to make one decision. It is the only one that really matters, and it costs him money.

An olive tree does not send a calendar invite. It just carries fruit, and the fruit keeps changing – green, then purple, then almost black. Somewhere in that drift there is a moment, and whoever is standing under the tree has to choose it.

Hermes Dimarakis makes that call in Ermioni every autumn. We asked him how he knows. The answer is less romantic than you would hope: he knows because he has already decided what he is willing to lose.

Picking early is a bad business decision

A green olive is stubborn. There is not much oil in it, it is hard, it does not give up its oil easily, and the same tree gives noticeably less than it would three weeks later. If you are paid by the litre, you wait.

What you get for picking early is flavour: the pepper at the back of the throat, the cut-grass smell you notice before you have tasted anything at all. Green fruit also carries the most polyphenols – our Koroneiki measures around 400 mg/kg total polyphenols and the Manaki around 150–200 mg/kg. Those are composition figures and nothing more. What they do tell you is how much character was in the fruit the moment it left the branch.

Picking late is easy

Leave the same tree another month and the fruit softens. More oil, and it comes out more easily, at a lower cost per litre. The taste rounds out and goes mild, and the grassy edge goes with it.

That is not bad oil. It is a different oil, and a good share of the cheap bottles on a supermarket shelf are made on exactly that logic: wait for the fruit to give up, then take the volume.

On price per litre we lose, comprehensively. That part is simply true. The difference was never going to show up in litres.

Two varieties, two different moments

Ermioni grows both, and they do not behave alike. Koroneiki is the loud one: peppery, fruity, measurably higher in polyphenols than the Manaki, and steady enough in a hot pan that the tin says excellent for cooking. Manaki is the smooth operator – buttery, mildly sweet, with a finish that settles rather than climbs. That is the one that is super for salads, and the one that took silver at the Athena International Olive Oil Competition 2026.

Same estate, same autumn, same press. The difference is the variety, and the week each one came off the tree.

How to check for yourself

Pour a tablespoon into your palm and taste it on its own, no bread. When the oil is made from fruit picked at the right time, three things happen in order: the fruit in your nose, then the grass, then the burn at the back of your throat. If all three turn up, somebody did their job properly.

And if it tastes of very little, that tells you something as well. Somebody chose the litres.

Argo's oils come from one estate and one harvest – currently 2025/2026, hand-picked and pressed within hours, cold-extracted below 27 °C. They are not cheap. But you now know what the money buys: a few weeks in autumn, and a decision somebody made standing under a tree.