How a Buddhist Frenchman Created One of Italy’s Purest Olive Oils

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 centrifuged 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.

Though his product is relatively new to the market, French-born Piro has been producing oil from these same groves for over 20 years. The story sounds a lot like divine intervention: In his twenties, Piro was backpacking from Paris to Tibet to study Buddhism. But his trip took a detour in Budapest, when he, by chance, met the late Buddhist master Namkhai Norbu at one of the city’s thermal baths. 

Piro cut his trip short to follow Norbu to the Maremma region of Tuscany, home to a Tibetan Buddhist cultural center — and thousands of olive trees. Piro began milling olives for fun, and became enamored with the process.

He and local miller Daniele Lepori started tinkering with olive oil production using three local olives and one from Puglia. They were finessing their product when, in 2018, Italy’s largest research council, Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, asked them to test out a vertical pressure-based filter that was originally developed for wine. (Piro has since purchased the prototype.) 

While most commercial producers filter fresh olio nuovo once or twice to remove particles that can cause the oil to become rancid over time, Piro filters it three times, using the proprietary filter. The additional process creates a remarkably shelf-stable oil that maintains its robust flavor for up to 18 months and has 650 milligrams of heart-healthy polyphenols per kilogram compared to the 200 to 300 grams found in the majority of supermarket brands. Most importantly, Olio Piro is delicious — it’s balanced and fruity, with notes of green grass, artichoke, and almonds and a subtle peppery finish that doesn’t compete for attention with other flavors in a dish.

When Piro went to market, accolades poured in, including ones that never existed previously, like the first-ever Platinum Health Claim award from the London International Olive Oil Competition. Shortly after, Romain’s sister Marie-Charlotte joined as CEO. A former real estate executive who lives in the U.S., she has focused Piro’s sights stateside and helped secure partnerships with top restaurants like Eleven Madison Park, where it’s used in the kitchen and distributed through their home delivery box. 

In addition to their standard extra-virgin olive oil designed for drizzling and dipping, Piro has developed a heat-friendly oil for cooking and is also working to create a medicinal olive oil in collaboration with a Los Angeles–based oncologist named, coincidentally, Lawrence Piro. 

In Brooklyn, far from the rolling hills of Tuscany, a bottle of Olio Piro sits on my countertop, ready to be drizzled with abandon on salads, scrambled eggs, pasta, and even ice cream. Not that I’m in any rush to finish the bottle — I know it will taste just as good in a year as the fresh olio nuovo I drank the day it was made. ($56 for one 500-milliliter bottle, olio-piro.com)