Pressed to Impress

Olio Piro uses modern milling tech to create a remarkably stable, healthy, and delicious extra-virgin olive oil.

- By Audrey Morgan

I'M HARVESTING A 300-YEAR-OLD OLIVE TREE in central Italy. It's a windy October day, and the silver-green leaves shimmer under the Tuscan sun. Using a small comb, I help Romain Piro brush his nearly ripened olives onto the net below us, trying my best not to smash the fruits that drop close to my feet.

And then, the clock starts ticking. “The branch is an umbilical cord,” Piro says, explaining that the olives start to oxidize as soon as they leave the tree. The same day the fruits are harvested, they will be sent to Piro's mill, where they will be crushed into a thick paste, slowly kneaded, and finally pressed to extract unfiltered olio nuovo, a robust liquid that is almost Day-Glo green. After resting the oil for three to seven days, Piro will begin a proprietary filtration process that has arguably made his eponymous olive oil, Olio Piro, one of the purest on the planet.