Back to The Drizzle
Newsletter

The Drizzle: Volume 6

September 20264 min readBy Demosthenes Hickling
The Drizzle: Volume 6

Stemming from the ancient Greek word for community, I launched DIMOS with a goal. To grow a community of people brought together by their love of good food. But a community cannot be built behind a computer screen; I needed to get out there and talk to people face-to-face. So I set out to visit our many amazing independent stockists across the UK.
This took me up to Dundee, Edinburgh, and Glasgow, my first time in Scotland, and eventually all the way down to Hastings, with a good many miles in between. Farm shops at the end of long lanes. Delis holding their ground on high streets. Cheesemongers who can name every farm within fifty miles, and butchers who'll tell you the field. What I found genuinely surprised me. The specialist food sector in this country is in far better shape than anyone gives it credit for. So many thriving farm shops, delis, cheesemongers and butchers. All run by people who are passionate about what they do and the products they stock.
That's the company our oil now keeps, and I don't take it lightly. On those shelves, we sit next to honey, cheese, bread, and preserves made by people who care as much about their thing as we do about ours. Everywhere I went, I left a taster bottle. You can't talk someone into good olive oil; you have to pour it. So we poured. I talked about Petalidi, about why we number the bottles, about the peppery catch at the back of the throat, and what it actually tells you. And I listened, mostly. I've learned more about retail, about produce, about this country, in four months on the road than in the two years before it. Because that's the part I didn't understand at the start. A community isn't only the people who buy from you. It's the people standing alongside you, doing the same difficult, unglamorous, worthwhile thing in their own corner of the map. Apart, we're a lot of small businesses. Together, we're something harder to ignore. There's plenty of the country left to see and a lot of shops I still owe a visit. I also run tasting events most weekends, in a different town each time. I'd love to see you at one. To find out where I'll be next, follow us at @dimos_olive_oil.
Our family's grove sits above the Bay of Kalamata. Before my great-grandmother planted the olive trees that give us our oil, it was a fig orchard.
olive trees that give us our oil, it was a fig orchard. Half of Messenia was, back then. Through the late 1800s, the hillsides here were terraced for figs, because Kalamata had become an export town, new port, new railway, ships going out full of figs, raisins, oil, and silk. But a fig is a hard thing to sell far from home. Fresh, you have days. Dried, you're laying the crop out in the September sun and praying the weather holds for a week, because one downpour and it's gone. Then the 1930s came, and the export markets went with it; world trade nearly halved in three years, and Greece took it worse than most. There was also the land itself. This corner of Messenia turned out to suit the Koroneiki olive about as well as anywhere on earth, and the same port that had been shipping figs started shipping something the world wanted more of. The name Kalamata stopped being a place and started being a mark of quality.
So when my great-grandmother put olive trees into a fig orchard, she was doing something I've come to find quite moving. Olives take years before they give you anything worth having. She was planting for a harvest she'd have to wait a long time to see, and for people who weren't born yet. Four generations on, we're the ones picking them.
A handful of the old fig trees are still standing. We take what we want from them in the summer and let the rest fall where they land. They dry there on the ground, and later we walk the rows and gather them into a jar in the kitchen. That jar comes out at harvest, when the nets are down, and everyone stops for lunch under the trees. Bread, cheese, and a fig that's been drying since August. The crop that came first is still feeding the people who took over from it.
D

Demosthenes Hickling

From Kalamata with Love

Share
Continue Reading

More from The Drizzle