Every summer of my childhood, I spent three months in Sparta, in my grandparents' house. I remember the stark, "Spartan" ways, and the silence of that home. I did not speak good Greek then, and language stood like a wall between us. So I spent my days outdoors: cycling in the garden, running after the chickens, wandering among the olive trees and the hives.
And then, at lunchtime, my grandmother would call us all to the table. The sight of it was unbelievable, covered with homemade Greek food, and somewhere on it, always, a jar of our own honey. For a brief moment each day, in striking contrast to the silence of the rest of it, the whole house would come alive. A flow of conversations, sounds, smells and tastes. A complete awakening of the senses.
For me, that feeling is what Nikkitas means. A connection to my roots, and to a home that, for a few minutes around a laden table, was utterly alive. The honey was simply part of it, the way it had always been: never for sale, only ever for the people we loved.
The hands that came before mine
My family has kept bees, alongside our olive groves, for five generations, each one passing the care to the next. Our home sits in a landscape thick with history: among the ruins of Ancient Sparta, at the foot of Mount Taygetos, flanked by the Eurotas river, a stone away from King Leonidas' tomb, and close to the UNESCO-listed town of Mystras. It is a hard place to reproduce anywhere else.
Behind every jar is the weight of that generational care: the hard work of reaching difficult fields, of carrying hundreds of baskets and beehives. Behind every jar there is the story of our land. We do not rush it, nor its becoming, nor the bees that make it.
We are a small operation, about five to seven of us through the year depending on the season, plus two or three beekeepers. Everyone knows the fields by heart, and the bees in them.
Every harvest depends on the quality of the ecosystem that surrounds it. Wild forests and ecosystems are our home.
Christina, Nikkitas
We are nomad beekeepers
We move the hives to follow the seasonal blooms, always looking for the right conditions for our bees, and always mindful of how far they have to travel to their food. The hives are placed in carefully chosen wild forests and ecosystems around Sparta, at varying altitudes on Mount Taygetos.
Our honeys are made the traditional way, with artisanal care, on fields and in forests we know by heart. The result flies around the flavour wheel, nutty, fruity, fresh, as good at breakfast as it is with after-dinner tea. Three honeys come back from the mountain, and each one tastes of exactly where and when the bees found it.
When I take my children to the beekeeper, they fall silent. They drink in the quiet and the work of it. It is almost a sacred thing, and very few of us reach for a camera, because the respect for what is happening takes over the need to keep it. The body remembers the generations past.
Three honeys, from one mountain
Each of our honeys is a unique story, an ever-changing desire of the bees. It is imagined, tailored and assembled by Nature itself, and it marks the turning of the seasons. No two harvests are ever quite the same, because the source is never quite the same. That is not a flaw to be corrected. It is the whole point of real honey.
So we bring back three. Each is its own story: a different colour, a different texture, a different feeling on the spoon. This is how I would describe them to you if you were standing in my kitchen.
- Pine. A honeydew honey, not a flower honey, and my own favourite. Dark pearl amber, very thick and slow to crystallise, with a wonderfully aromatic fragrance. It is less sweet than the honey you know, more mineral and resinous, the taste of the forest itself, with high mineral content and a very strong antioxidant profile.
- Thyme. The rare one. Dark amber, with a splendid, complex, intense aroma of wild herbs and a gentle spice, in a very thick honey that takes six to twelve months to crystallise. It carries strong antibacterial and antiseptic properties, and a spoonful tastes of a Greek hillside in summer.
- Flowers and Conifers. Gathered higher up, and rare. Dark red, with a wonderful aroma and a milder, gentler taste, layered with the scents of the whole forest, rich and slowly evolving on the tongue. It is full of minerals, B-complex vitamins and amino acids.
Pine and thyme could not be more different on the spoon, and that is exactly why we keep all three. One mountain, one season, three honeys, each one true to the place the bees found it.
What is really in the jar
Because it is raw, extracted without heating and bottled without pasteurisation, it keeps everything Nature put in it: the natural enzymes, the pollen, the nutritional compounds. Heat is what undoes honey. Most commercial honey is warmed so it flows and filters easily, and that heat destroys the enzymes, dims the antioxidants, and breaks down glucose oxidase, the very enzyme that gives honey its antibacterial power. We do none of that. Ours arrives the way it left the comb.
It is independently lab-tested, and the results confirm high antioxidant activity, antibacterial properties and elevated mineral content, including iron, calcium and magnesium. Real honey is antibacterial, antioxidant, anti-inflammatory and a quiet support to the immune system, the way it has been used for thousands of years. Long before refined sugar, honey was Europe's principal sweetener and one of its oldest medicines. To this day, Greeks eat more honey per person than almost anyone, close to two kilos each a year. It has never left our table.
It is also a small miracle of labour. A single 400g jar is the work of bees visiting roughly two million flowers, and one bee makes only about a twelfth of a teaspoon of honey in her whole life. When you hold the jar, you are holding the effort of a great many of them.
Each bee is an artisan, infusing scents and amplifying floral harmonies.
Christina, Nikkitas
Why provenance matters with honey
It saddens me how much honey is not what it claims to be. The United Kingdom imports the great majority of its honey, and honey is one of the most commonly adulterated foods in the world, often quietly thinned with cheap sugar syrups before it ever reaches a jar.
Ours is one family, traceable to the very forest it came from. We will tell you which mountain, which season, which bees, because there is nothing in it we would ever need to hide. A jar you cannot trace is only a label. A jar you can is a place, a season, and the bees that were there. Because each harvest is small and seasonal, there are times it sells out and a wait for the next. We would rather that than make more than the forest can honestly give.
What we give back
Working this way gives back more than honey. The same traditional care that protects the bees, the careful composting and the refusal to rely on machines, builds the health of the land they forage. Nothing is wasted, and our glass jars are responsibly sourced and infinitely recyclable, in 100% recyclable packaging.
We also gather from a community of very small artisan producers around us, hundreds of tiny neighbouring family groves and fields, all keeping the same respect for the old ways in the wild lands of Sparta. And we have partnered with Desmos, a non-profit foundation, to support local schools in Sparta with educational equipment and supplies.
How a private family honey became something to share
For most of my life, we had never thought of selling any of it. Then, in 2017, I found myself at dinner at L'Atelier de Joël Robuchon, at the time a Michelin-starred restaurant in London. The chef was talking about an olive oil he had just found, and I told him, a little cheekily, that my family made a rather good one of our own. He was curious, and asked me to bring it the next day.
When I came back he was waiting with a professional buyer. They tasted the oil, the olives and the honey, loved all of it, and told me we should make proper packaging for the products. Until then, it had all simply been for friends and family. That is how it began.
How it finds its way to you
The Fine Source came later, and gently. It was started by three friends here in London who love food the way we do, and whose frustration I understood at once: the real things, the honey on a breakfast table in the Peloponnese, were almost impossible to buy once you were home again. Their answer was simple. Go to the source. Understand where something comes from, how it was made, and by whom.
So that is what they do. Every product they carry is traceable to its producer. They visit, they taste, they verify, and they choose only what they would happily serve at their own table.
I said yes for two reasons. The first was the people. We met through our children, who play basketball together, and I could see they valued the personal side of all this as much as I do: the sharing of a story, and the carrying of our name the way we would carry it ourselves. The second was practical. To bring what we make to more tables, across all the new hurdles of trading between countries, I needed a partner I could trust completely. In them, I found one.
And now, for the first time, you can keep our honey on your own table. You can even taste it first, at their London tasting room, 92 York Street, before you buy. It is available at The Fine Source.
