Mastiha: The Ingredient From One Island That Has Been on Every Greek Table for Three Thousand Years

There is a moment that happens at Nectar fairly regularly, usually toward the end of a meal, when a small cold glass arrives at a table that did not order it.

We pour mastiha as a house serve for regulars, for large groups who have eaten well and stayed long, and for guests we want to look after in the particular way that the end of a good meal deserves. It is not on the menu. It just appears. A small glass, served cold, clear as water, with a quality that is immediately distinctive and almost impossible to place.

The reaction is almost always the same. People taste it, pause, and then try to find the word for what they are experiencing. Pine comes up most often. Resin. Something herbal. Something clean. Something vaguely familiar even though they cannot identify where they have encountered it before. Occasionally someone says it tastes like chewing gum from a Greek holiday, which is accurate in a way they do not quite realise: the same ingredient is used in both.

What they are tasting is a flavour that has been part of Greek life since before recorded history. One of the oldest cultivated products in the world, from an island that produces it and nowhere else on earth.

One island. One resin. No explanation.

The mastic tree, Pistacia lentiscus, grows throughout the Mediterranean. It grows in Spain, in Italy, in Turkey, in North Africa, across the Greek islands. In most of those places it is an unremarkable shrub, a piece of landscape that nobody thinks much about.

In the southern villages of the Greek island of Chios, something completely different happens.

Score the bark of a mastic tree in southern Chios and the tree bleeds. A slow, clear resin emerges from the wound, moving through the air as the bark tries to heal itself. The resin forms teardrops as it falls, hanging in the air for a moment before dropping to the ground below. As it dries, it crystallises into small, irregular pieces that are translucent and slightly cloudy, with a faint greenish tint. These crystals are mastiha. They smell of pine and cedar and something more ancient and difficult to name. They have been collected by hand in these same villages for over three thousand years.

The extraordinary thing is that the same tree, grown from the same seeds, planted in similar soil and similar climate elsewhere in the Mediterranean, does not produce this resin. Attempts to replicate the process have been made across centuries and across dozens of locations. None have succeeded. Something in the specific combination of Chios's limestone-rich volcanic soil, its particular microclimate, the dry summers and mild winters, the proximity of the sea: together these create conditions that exist nowhere else. Separate any one of those variables and the trees grow but the resin does not flow.

Nobody has fully explained why. Scientists have studied the phenomenon for decades. The current understanding is that the interaction between the specific microclimate of southern Chios and the particular strain of the tree that grows there produces the resin, but the precise mechanism remains not entirely resolved. The people of the mastic villages, who have been farming these trees for their entire lives and whose grandparents farmed them before them, tend to give a different kind of answer. They say that the tree has feelings. That it bleeds because it has been asked to, and that only here does it choose to respond.

The 24 villages of southern Chios that produce mastiha are known collectively as the mastichochoria. The European Union recognised the geographical uniqueness of what they produce by granting Chios Mastiha Protected Designation of Origin status in 1997, placing it in the same category as Champagne, Parmigiano-Reggiano, and Roquefort: products so specific to their place of origin that the name itself is legally protected. UNESCO added the traditional harvesting practices of Chios mastiha to its Intangible Cultural Heritage list in 2014, acknowledging that what happens in those villages is not simply agriculture but a living cultural tradition of global significance.

Three thousand years of use

The history of mastiha predates most things that exist today. Herodotus wrote about it in the fifth century BC. The ancient Greeks used it medicinally, chewing the resin to aid digestion, freshen breath, and treat stomach complaints. Romans incorporated it into wine and cooking. The word stomachic, meaning something that settles the stomach, is applied to mastiha in texts going back two millennia.

During the Byzantine Empire, mastiha from Chios was so valuable that it was worth more than gold by weight. The Byzantine court controlled its production closely and used it as a diplomatic gift to other rulers. When the Genoese took control of Chios in the fourteenth century, they continued the same practice: the mastic trade was too valuable to leave unregulated, and the villages that produced it were given special protections that the rest of the island did not enjoy.

The Ottoman Empire that followed continued the tradition of treating mastiha as a uniquely precious commodity. The Ottoman Empire imposed a specific tax on its production, which tells you everything about how they regarded it. The Sultan's household used mastiha in cooking, in cosmetics, and in medicine. When the Greek population of Chios rose up against Ottoman rule in 1822 and was massacred in one of the most brutal episodes of the Greek War of Independence, the mastic villages were largely spared. The Sultan needed the mastiha.

The production of mastiha liqueur as a distinct spirit began in the nineteenth century, when local producers shifted from mastic-infused ouzo to developing a distinct liqueur through the distillation of mastic crystals combined with pure agricultural alcohol and sugar. What had previously been a raw ingredient used across many applications became a product in its own right, bottled and traded and eventually exported across the world.

How it is harvested

The harvesting process is one of the most labour-intensive agricultural practices that survives in Europe today, and it has changed almost nothing since the Byzantine period.

The preparation begins before the resin itself. The ground around each tree is weeded, levelled, and covered with white limestone powder that acts as a clean surface. When the resin teardrops fall from the scored bark, they land on the white limestone rather than the earth, which means they can be collected without contamination. The visual of a mastic grove prepared for harvest, with the ground around each tree whitened as if it has been dusted with snow, is one of the most striking sights in Greek agriculture.

The scoring itself, known as kentima, is done with a sharp pointed tool that makes small, precise incisions in the bark. The mastic then seeps out of the tree like tears as the bark tries to heal itself. It takes fifteen to twenty days for the resin to harden sufficiently to be collected. The main harvesting season runs from June to September, which means the villages are engaged in active harvest for a significant portion of the year.

Once collected, the crystals are cleaned by hand. Traditionally this was women's work, done in groups, the community gathering to sort through the harvest piece by piece, separating the clean crystals from any debris. The social dimension of mastiha production, the way it has organised village life and community relationships across centuries, is part of what UNESCO was recognising when it added it to the Intangible Cultural Heritage list.

What it actually tastes like

Pine is the note that most people reach for first, and it is accurate in the sense that mastiha does carry a resinous, piney quality that is distinctive and immediate. But pine as a description undersells the complexity of what is in the glass.

The full flavour profile of mastiha sits across several registers simultaneously. There is the resinous pine quality, bright and clean rather than heavy. There is cedar beneath it, adding depth and warmth. A very faint honey sweetness that does not read as sugary but as natural and organic. A whisper of anise that is present without being forward. And something slightly medicinal in the best possible sense: the quality of a good herbal digestif that leaves you feeling settled rather than merely drunk.

The finish is long and clean and slightly cooling. It does not dissipate quickly. It lingers in the way that a high-quality resin-based spirit lingers, extending the experience past the last sip.

What makes mastiha familiar without being placeable is the fact that many people have encountered it in forms they did not recognise as mastiha. Greek pastries and breads often include it. Traditional Greek sweets use it. The distinctive flavour of certain Greek chewing gums comes directly from mastic resin. Anyone who has spent time in Greece, eaten in Greek homes, or grown up around Greek cooking will have tasted mastiha many times without knowing what it was. The liqueur simply concentrates and clarifies that flavour into something more obviously itself.

How Greeks drink it

In Greece, mastiha occupies almost exactly the same cultural position as limoncello does in Italy. It is the end-of-meal spirit, the digestif that signals the meal is closing, the thing poured for guests as a gesture of hospitality and care.

It is served cold, always. Ideally from a bottle kept in the freezer so it arrives at the table properly chilled, the glass slightly frosted. It can be sipped slowly, small amounts at a time, or taken in a single movement depending on the mood of the table. Greeks tend not to agonise over this distinction. Mastiha is generous in the way that the best end-of-meal spirits are generous: it works however you want to drink it.

At Nectar, we serve it the same way. A small cold glass, uninvited, as a mark of appreciation. The reaction it produces is part of why we love using it.

Mastiha at Nectar

Mastiha has been part of the Nectar cocktail programme since we opened, though it has not always been prominently explained.

It appears in the Drops of the River, the most botanical and floral cocktail on the menu, where its piney resinous quality sits alongside Bombay Sapphire, St Germain elderflower, and jasmine syrup. The mastiha in the Drops of the River is doing what it does best in a cocktail context: connecting ingredients that might otherwise feel disparate, sitting underneath the more obviously floral notes and giving the whole drink a depth and an earthiness that the other ingredients alone would not produce.

It appears in the Local Connection, our newest cocktail and the most structurally complex piece of work currently on the menu. The Local Connection is a densed white negroni built on Bombay Sapphire, Noilly Prat, Old Poison's Leith Bitter Bianco, and mastiha, finished with Mediterranean olive oil through the densing technique developed by Panda and Sons. In that cocktail, mastiha is the fourth voice in a conversation between equal ingredients, its Mediterranean botanical character connecting the gin, the Edinburgh-made aperitivo, and the dry vermouth into something coherent that could not be achieved without it.

And it appears as a house serve, poured cold for guests who have earned it. Which is the most Greek way to use it and the one that feels most true to what mastiha has always been: an expression of hospitality at the end of a meal, a small cold glass that says the evening has been good and is not quite over yet.

Ask your waiter when you are next in. If the moment is right, it will appear without you having to ask at all.

Book a table at Nectar Bar and find out what mastiha actually tastes like.

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