Food And Drink in Rethymno

Cretan cooking is the Mediterranean diet in its original sense — the one doctors came to study in the 1950s, trying to work out why islanders lived longer. The base is plain: olive oil instead of fat, wild greens, pulses, cheese and wine, not much meat. Around Rethymno you can meet it at the source rather than in a restaurant. Farm visits open up the whole holding: you pick what is growing, and lunch is cooked in front of you from what you gathered. In the shepherds' huts up in the hills, graviera is still made in a copper kettle over wood, from sheep's milk, the way it was before any certification.

Wine and oil form a line of their own. Crete kept its indigenous grapes — vilana, kotsifali, liatiko — varieties barely grown anywhere else, and tastings are usually built around them. The olive presses explain what separates a first cold pressing from the rest: it comes down to acidity and to the hours between picking and pressing, and they let you taste the difference. Some routes pair a winery with Lake Kournas, the only freshwater lake on Crete.

The evening format is the Cretan night. It is not a show with an audience: in a mountain taverna they play the lyra and the laouto, dance in a circle, pour raki, and set the table with dakos, antikristo lamb and cheeses from the highlands. Sometimes these evenings are joined to a sunset safari — first the viewpoints in the Psiloritis foothills, then the village and dinner. The drive back to town takes under an hour.