How Olive Oil and Wine are Similar by Cristina Stribacu

There are five small glasses on the table. Each one holds a different extra virgin olive oil. All five are Greek. All five were cold extracted within the last harvest season.

I ask the people around the table to smell them.

The room goes quiet.

Not the polite quiet of people pretending to concentrate. The genuine quiet of people who have just noticed something they cannot quite explain. They look up. They look at each other. Some smile. Some frown slightly, the way you do when something unexpected happens and you are not sure yet what to make of it.

None of the five oils smell the same.

Not even close.

This is the moment I live for. Because in that silence, something shifts. The idea they walked in with, that olive oil is olive oil, that one bottle is more or less like another, dissolves completely. And something more interesting takes its place.

A question.

How is this possible?

We treated olive oil like a commodity. We were wrong.

For most of the twentieth century, the world treated olive oil the way it once treated wine. A bulk product. Blended from multiple origins, standardized for consistency, sold on price. The label told you very little. The bottle told you even less.

Wine went through exactly this phase. And then, in the 1960s and 1970s, something changed. Consumers started asking where it came from. Which region. Which grape. Which producer. Which year. They started understanding that a wine from one valley tasted nothing like a wine from the valley next to it, even when made from the same grape. That the soil, the altitude, the rainfall, the temperature at night, all of it ended up in the glass.

They discovered terroir.

And wine was never the same again.

Extra virgin olive oil is living that revolution right now. And the people who discover it first, who make the shift from buying a product to choosing an origin, find that they cannot go back. Not because someone told them to. Because they tasted the difference themselves.

Before we go further, a small glass

If you ever find yourself passing through Messinia, come find me. We will sit together among the groves, pour a few oils, and I will show you what terroir means in a way that no article can fully capture.

But you can begin right now. All you need is a small glass and a quiet moment.

Cup it in both hands to warm the oil. Swirl gently. Bring it to your nose and breathe slowly. Then sip, let it move across your entire palate. Notice the fruitiness, the bitterness, the peppery sensation at the back of your throat. That heat is the polyphenols at work. That is the oil telling you it is alive.

Now try a different oil. Notice what changes.

You are, in that moment, tasting a place. A season. A decision made at exactly the right moment by someone who knew their land.

You are tasting terroir.

Five oils. Five different worlds. And then some.

This is what makes Greek extra virgin olive oil endlessly fascinating, and almost impossible to reduce to a single story.

Greece is not one olive oil. It is dozens. Each region, each valley, each variety of olive producing something distinct, something irreplaceable, something that could not have come from anywhere else on earth.

• Koroneiki | the great olive of the Peloponnese. Small, almost wild-looking, intensely aromatic. In the right hands, from the right hillside, it produces an oil that is explosive with green fruit, with pepper, with a kind of raw vitality that makes you understand immediately why this variety has survived for thousands of years. This is an oil that demands your attention.
• Athinolia |  the olive of Lakonia, delicate and grassy, with a lightness that seems almost paradoxical for something so ancient. Where Koroneiki shouts, Athinolia whispers. It draws you in. It rewards patience.
• Manaki | grown in the cooler elevations of the Peloponnese, elegantly fruity, with notes of green apple and fresh-cut herbs that arrive in layers. An oil for people who think they do not like olive oil, because it surprises them completely.
• Chalkidiki | from the north of Greece, a variety as different from Koroneiki as Chardonnay is from Syrah. Large, generous, with a mild and buttery character that feels almost Mediterranean in the broadest sense-warm, welcoming, easy to love. An oil that bridges worlds.
• Megaritiki | from the hills of the Saronic Gulf, with an almost mineral quality, a sense of ripe tomato and wild herbs of the Aegean sea, a finish that stays on the palate long after everything else has gone quiet.
• Makris | mythological, like its name suggests. An oil of rare refinement, with a floral delicacy that surprises those who expect Greek olive oil to be bold. It reminds you that complexity does not always arrive loudly.
• Kolovi | from the island of Lesvos, one of Greece’s most storied olive oil islands. An oil with depth and character, rich and full-bodied, with a warmth that feels like the Aegean itself – generous, ancient, unhurried.

And there are more. Many more.

Each one a different conversation. Each one a different world.

And this is just Greece.

The Terroir of Messinia, and the name the world already knows

There is a region in the southwestern Peloponnese that those who truly know olive oil consider among the finest terroirs on earth.

Messinia. And at its heart, a name that already lives in kitchens across the world: Kalamata.

Most people know Kalamata for its olives, those deep, rich, purple table olives that have become a staple of Mediterranean cooking everywhere. But what Kalamata truly represents is something larger. It is a territory. A tradition. A way of understanding the olive that stretches back further than recorded history. The Kalamata area does not just produce great olives. It produces the conditions – the soil, the light, the particular generosity of the Messenian climate, in which great olive oil becomes not just possible, but inevitable.

A landscape of ancient groves stretching across hills that catch the Ionian breeze. Warm days, cool nights, dry summers that stress the olive tree just enough to concentrate everything that matters into the fruit. Soils that have been cultivating olives for millennia, that carry in them the memory of every harvest that came before.

This is not romantic exaggeration. This is terroir. The specific, unrepeatable combination of land and climate and human knowledge that produces something that could only have come from here.

When I pour a Messinian extra virgin olive oil, cold extracted at its peak, still carrying the intensity of an early harvest,  and I watch someone smell it for the first time, I see the same thing every time.

They go still.

Not because they are performing appreciation. But because something in them recognizes it. Something primal. Something that existed before language, before categories, before the idea of premium and commodity.

The Greeks have a word for it: αρχέτυπο. Archetypal. The original form. The thing from which everything else is derived.

A great Messinian olive oil is archetypal in exactly this sense. In it you can smell the sun-warmed stone, the wild thyme on the hillside, the morning air at harvest time. You can taste a civilization that understood, thousands of years before food science confirmed it, that this oil was something extraordinary.

What to look for, the language of quality

Once you start thinking about extra virgin olive oil the way you think about wine, the label becomes fascinating rather than confusing.

Single origin : the oil comes from one specific place. Not blended from multiple countries or regions. This is where terroir begins.

Single farm or single estate : one producer, one standard, one vision. When a producer puts their name and their specific grove behind a bottle, they are making a promise that a blended, anonymous oil never can.

Variety : the cultivar of olive. Koroneiki, Athinolia, Manaki, Chalkidiki, Megaritiki, Makris, Kolovi, and many more from Greece alone. Learning your preferred variety is like learning your preferred grape. It changes everything about how you choose.

Cold extracted : no heat used in extraction, preserving every aromatic compound, every polyphenol, every nuance the grove and the season produced. In a truly great extra virgin olive oil, this is not optional.

These are not marketing terms. They are the vocabulary of an entirely different relationship with what you put on your table.

The moment people change

At every tasting, in the elegant lobby of a hotel in Messinia, at the LIÁ Olive Oil Hub, in a private dining room –  there is a moment that never changes.

After the third or fourth oil, someone sets down their glass and says: “I had no idea.”

And then they say something else. They talk about the bottle at home. They talk about how they never thought about it before. And then, almost always, they say the thing that moves me every time:

“From now on I want to know where it comes from. I want a single farm. I want to understand what I am tasting.”

This is the revolution that wine went through fifty years ago.

It is happening in olive oil right now.

And once you have felt it,  once you have stood in a room where five Greek extra virgin olive oils told five completely different stories, you cannot unfeel it.

The only question is which world you want to discover first.

Cristina Stribacu is the founder of LIÁ and the LIÁ Olive Oil Hub in Messinia, Greece - one of the world's great olive oil terroirs. She studied art history, and she has never quite stopped seeing the world through that lens: as a place where beauty, culture and memory converge. In Messinia, she found all three in an olive grove. She leads tastings and sensory experiences, guided by a single belief - that great olive oil is not a product. It is a place, a season, and a conversation that has been going on for thousands of years.