Koroneiki olives
The tiny Greek olive behind the world’s most celebrated extra virgin oils.
The Koroneiki is small — almost comically so — but it punches far above its weight. It is the dominant oil olive of Greece, especially Crete and the Peloponnese, and it presses into an intensely green, aromatic, peppery oil that regularly tops the world’s quality competitions. Low yield of flesh, high yield of greatness.
- Origin
- Crete & Peloponnese · Greece
- Type
- Oil olive
- Size
- Very small
- Flavour (oil)
- Intense, green, peppery
- Aroma
- Herbs, artichoke, grass
- Keeps
- Excellent — high polyphenols
- Best for
- Finishing, the good bottle
Small olive, serious oil
Greece eats more olive oil per head than anywhere on earth, and most of it is Koroneiki. The oil is prized for its high polyphenol content — that peppery, bitter intensity that signals both flavour and health — and for its stability, which lets a good Cretan Koroneiki age more gracefully than most. It is the olive behind a large share of the medal-winning single-origin oils you see in good shops.
A great deal of excellent Greek Koroneiki is sold cheaply in bulk to other countries, blended away, and bottled under someone else’s flag — the same oil that wins competitions as a single origin disappears anonymously into “Mediterranean blend.” If you want the real thing, buy it Greek, single-origin, with a harvest date. You are often buying world-class oil at a fraction of the famous-name price.