The Kontogiannis family in their grove near Corinth.
We would like to introduce you to the Kontogiannis family a little more closely. Let us begin where the story itself begins: about a hundred and forty years ago, on a hillside above Corinth.
It was there that Theo Kontogiannis’s great-great-grandfather planted his first vineyard, at the end of the 19th century. Every generation since has worked this soil – today it is the fifth. Theo runs the farm together with his sister Hope, and their parents are still very much part of it.
The farm lies at the foot of Acrocorinth, the old fortress above the town. It is not one single piece of land but many: plots between the coast and six hundred and fifty metres, each with its own soil, its own climate, its own wind off the Gulf of Corinth. Vineyards, olive groves, almond trees, fruit trees, wild herbs. In a region where usually only one crop grows at a time, these patches are small islands of variety.
A question, and an answer from the archive
In 1999 the family converted to organic farming. Seven years later they asked themselves a more uncomfortable question: is that actually enough? Even organic farming, they found, is largely about what you take from the soil – and far less about what you give back. What is our contribution to the life around us?
Looking for an answer, they went into the family archive. And found their great-grandparents’ notes.
What those notes described was already strikingly close to biodynamic farming. The old way of working the land – long before anyone gave it a name – had known much of what the family was now trying to learn afresh. They did not need to invent anything. They needed to read back.
Since 2006 the farm has worked consistently along biodynamic lines.
For us at Platanenblatt, that carries a particular resonance. In his Agriculture Course of 1924, Rudolf Steiner wrote that every farm ought really to aspire to the state of a self-contained individuality. That sentence stands today on the Kontogiannis family’s website – arrived at not through theory, but through their grandparents.
What a family reveals about itself
You come to know people by what they take care of when no one is asking them to.
The Kontogiannis family does not irrigate. They dry-farm, the way it used to be done – which in a Greece of ever hotter summers grows harder every year. Their conviction: a vine that has to send its roots down by itself becomes stronger than one that is handed its water.
And they take on land that others have given up. Old vineyards and groves nearby, some more than a hundred years old, abandoned because they had become too much work. The family brings them back. Not because it pays – but because hundred-year-old vines are not something you simply let die.
Chamomile grows between the vines. It helps the soil and shields the vines from heat stress. That someone knows this and does it says more about a farm than any certificate.
Why we belong together
When we started talking to one another, it very quickly stopped being only about oil.
Theo told us about an idea he has been carrying around for some time, born out of conversations with his son: “Το σχολείο της Τροφής”, the school of nourishment. A place where people learn where food really comes from, and what our daily lives in the cities do to the soil it grows in.
We had written to him shortly before about our own learning garden in the olive grove. Neither of us knew the other was thinking the same thing.
For us, that was the moment a good personal relationship turned into something larger. Since then we have been working on a shared idea: doing business differently. Carrying the thinking behind community-supported agriculture across borders, building on community and direct relationships, producing as naturally as we can. That only works with people who are looking in the same direction – and we have found them.
We will tell you more as it takes shape. For today this is enough: that you know whose hands the next harvest is in.
Warm regards,
Urte and Ralf