Food And Drink in Crete

Cretan cooking is the very food from which the Mediterranean diet was written down in the nineteen-fifties: researchers came to study why the locals lived longer and found olive oil in almost every dish. Consumption here is still among the highest per head in the world, and the oil is often unrefined, from a single village, with a bitter note at the finish.

The programmes are built around producers. The wineries lie in the foothills, and the grape varieties are local — kotsifali and vilana, barely seen outside Greece. The dairies make graviera from sheep milk and mizithra, fresh and faintly sweet, eaten with honey. On the farms they show how raki is distilled, the twice-run grape spirit with which a Cretan greets a guest instead of saying hello.

The Cretan night stands apart: a village taverna, lyra, a meze of a dozen plates and dancing until midnight. Practical notes: a tasting means it is better not to drive, so the option with a driver beats a rental. Meze is built for a group, with four people taking eight to ten plates. Greeks dine after nine, and before that a taverna may stand empty. The grape harvest is in September, when work at the wineries can actually be seen.