Cretan Food, Local Culture & Homemade Wine: a lifetime experience or a tour like no other in Chania Crete Greece!
- Stelios
- 2 days ago
- 4 min read
Back in 2023 we released a brand new Food Tour in Chania Crete Greece. The spark came from our Beer Tours guests, that were asking for a lifetime experience that goes deeper, beyond the surface.
We spent around 7 months of driving around in Chania's countryside, in order to find the right places & local people that wanted to be part of it. What we created was a tour of the beaten path but also approachable that does not require extra skills:
Chania Villages Food Experience - Crete, was born.
Food tour chania crete - the elements
Creating a food tour that it will only focus in food, was not an option for us.
Food is a huge part of the Cretan culture & it is also closely connected with nature, history, local stories, country's side villages & the local population.
They're still producing high quality produces or they even find & harvest goods, directly from nature. This is the frame for our new experience.
Food:
Crete is the core of the well-known worldwide Mediterranean Diet. The most healthy & tasty diet in the world. Even though we live in this food paradise, the majority of the local population, have changed their eating habits to fast & unhealthy choices. This fact, has a big impact on the food menus & ingredients that are offered to the island's visitors.
Downtown food tours are focusing to street food, presenting it as traditional, Cretan & healthy. This food might be tasty, certainly not traditional & healthy.
Finally, all these tours, end up going at the same spots & taste the same goods.
What we did, was to uncover small, almost hidden café-taverns, that even locals don't know that they exist & they are still using plenty of virgin olive oil, seasonal or wild foraged ingredients & herbs.
The owners still have their own gardens, animals & they still cook the old recipes.
Nature & villages:
Crete & specially Chania, has a very reach flora.
Only if you have the chance to experience it, at least a part of it,, you'll have a clear picture of Chania. Ancient olive groves, grapevines, wild flowers, fruit & nut trees are part of the natural landscape.
We made the decision to run the tour, at the outskirts of Chania's White Mountains range. This amazing low volume traffic route in nature with free range animals around, like goats & sheep's, creates a memorable experience.
These villages of Chania, just only 40-50 years ago, were full of people & vibrant elementary schools. People working the earth & making their living, while a network of exchanging goods, made money of no big importance in everyday life.
False governmental policies, let these villages without infrastructure & finally forced the local population to abandon them.
Our aim is, by visiting some of these villages, to keep the memories from the past alive, to introduce our guests to the old traditions & to encourage their population to keep doing what they are still doing.
History, local stories & people:
You cannot run a tour in Crete without historical facts & local stories.
Chania have remains from different eras & different empires, starting from around 3.500 BC. Even though our food tour is not historical, just in case you love history, we can go deeper as we love history as well.
Local stories & traditions are more valuable when we hear them from villagers, that had the chance to live them. Friendly people, unspoiled from the modern way of life, are ready to welcome us & to offer us whatever they have available like fruits, homemade cookies, wine or just having a chat using their body language.
These moments are just unforgettable.
Local homes & home made wines:
In our travels, we are curious to see, how a local's house looks from inside.
We thought, that our guests might feel the same. So finding a local villager that would be interested in this idea while feeling comfortable to open his private space to us and to our guests, was a must.
We felt very lucky & happy when we found him but also when we realized that he is also a home made wine producer.
Finally we combined the visit to his place with a wine tasting session direct from the old wooden oak barrels. with wines of different years.
This experience might be the core of our Chania Villages Food Experience - Crete.
A true non-touristy lifetime experience!
our core Values
We are trying to keep alive the old traditions & memories alive, through the eyes of our guests, while focusing on quality than quantity: homemade wine, distilled alcohol spirits, small garden with vegetables, virgin olive oil, fruits, nut trees, honey, cheese & more directly from the producers.
This tour is a five hours deep dive full of Cretan Gastronomy, Old School Village Culture & Homemade Wine!
It is a cultural immersion, not only delicious & informative but also a lifetime experience that you'll simply never forget, totally different than a downtown Chania touristy food tour.
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