Food & Wine
Puglia Olive Oil: A Guide to Italy’s Green Gold
If Puglia had to be bottled, it would be olive oil. The heel of Italy is the country’s oil heartland by a huge margin, a place where silver-green groves run to the horizon and single trees can be older than the towns beside them. Here is what makes Puglian olive oil special, which oils to look for and how to taste the real thing on a trip.
Why Puglia makes so much of Italy’s olive oil
The numbers are staggering. With more than 60 million olive trees, Puglia produces around 40 per cent of Italy’s olive oil in an ordinary year and closer to half in a good one. That is around 5 per cent of the world’s supply, from one region roughly the size of Wales.
The reasons are geography and history. Puglia is flat or gently rolling, drenched in sun, cooled by two seas and blessed with limestone soils that olives love. People have pressed oil here since antiquity, and for centuries Puglian oil quietly filled lamps and kitchens across Europe, often sold in bulk under other regions’ names. Only recently has it stepped out under its own label as some of the finest extra virgin oil in Italy.
The taste: Coratina and Puglia’s olive varieties
Puglian oil does not taste like the mild, buttery stuff many people expect. Its signature olive, the Coratina, grown around Bari and Andria, is one of the most polyphenol-rich olives in the world: the oil is green, robustly bitter and peppery, with a catch at the back of the throat that tells you it is fresh and full of antioxidants. If your oil makes you cough slightly, that is a good sign.
Coratina is not the whole story. Puglia grows dozens of varieties, and the character of the oil changes as you travel across the region.
| Variety | Where it grows | What it tastes like |
|---|---|---|
| Coratina | Terra di Bari, around Andria | Intense, bitter and peppery, very high in polyphenols |
| Ogliarola | Bari and the Salento | Softer and more delicate, an everyday oil |
| Cellina di Nardò | The Salento | Fruity and traditional, the tree hit hardest by Xylella |
| Peranzana | Foggia and the Tavoliere | Sweet and balanced, also eaten as a table olive |
The DOP oils to look for
Like wine, the best Puglian oils carry a protected designation of origin (DOP in Italian, PDO in English) that ties them to a place and a set of rules. If you want to buy something genuinely regional rather than a generic "product of Italy", look for these on the label:
- Terra di Bari DOP, including the Castel del Monte area: Coratina-led, robust and celebrated.
- Terra d’Otranto DOP: the classic oil of the deep Salento.
- Collina di Brindisi DOP: from the gentle hills around Brindisi.
- Dauno DOP: from the province of Foggia and the Gargano.
- Terre Tarentine DOP: from the arc of land around Taranto.
Whatever you buy, check for two things: the words "extra virgin" and a recent harvest date. Olive oil is a fresh product, not a wine to lay down, and it is at its best within a year or so of pressing.
The ancient trees, and the Xylella tragedy
Drive through the countryside near Ostuni, Fasano and Monopoli and you pass groves of ulivi secolari, monumental olive trees with trunks twisted into fantastical shapes by the centuries. Many are over a thousand years old, and a few are claimed at two to three thousand, which would make them older than the Roman Empire. Puglia protects the oldest ones by law, and their gnarled silhouettes are as much a symbol of the region as the trulli.
This landscape is also living through a slow disaster. Since 2013 a bacterium called Xylella fastidiosa, spread by an insect, has been killing the olive trees of the Salento, starting in the far south near Gallipoli and creeping north. More than 21 million trees have been affected, whole horizons of them left grey and skeletal. Scientists, farmers and the region are replanting with resistant varieties, but the recovery will take generations. It is worth knowing, because those bare trees you may see in the south are not neglect. They are the front line of a fight to save one of Europe’s great agricultural landscapes.
How to taste and buy the real thing on a trip
The best way to understand Puglian oil is to taste it where it is made. Many masserie, the region’s fortified farmhouses, have their own groves and mills and will walk you through a tasting, often alongside the local wines. If you come in late autumn, roughly late October to December, you can catch the harvest and taste olio nuovo, the cloudy, electric-green new oil straight from the press, at its peppery peak.
In the Salento, look out for the frantoi ipogei, underground olive mills carved into the rock centuries ago, when oil was pressed below ground to keep it warm through winter. Several around Gallipoli and Presicce are open to visit. And wherever you are, buy your oil direct from an estate or a proper alimentari rather than a supermarket: a tin of single-estate Coratina is one of the best and most Puglian things you can carry home.
For more on eating your way around the region, see what to eat in Puglia and our practical Puglia travel tips. That Puglia makes a tenth of the world’s olive oil is just one of our favourite fun facts about Puglia, a region that hides a lot behind its quiet reputation.
Raised in the province of Brindisi, 30 years in Puglia. About this site