Sergio Cozzaglio has revived forgotten olive varieties and sharpened his tree pruning skills to award-winning status, all in pursuit of an oil that will simply meet his standards.
Villa Romana is an extra-virgin oil pressed from an previously unknown and likely ancient olive variety that grows exclusively on the shores of Lake Garda, in the northern Italian region of Lombardy. Sergio Cozzaglio, who discovered the olives on trees amid the 2,000-year-old ruins of a Roman nobleman’s lakefront villa, rummaged around in his office and pulled out a single half-liter bottle, labeled with only an extra-large Post-it note.
My own interest in olive oil had started not long ago, evolving rapidly into a fixation on best-before dates and hard-to-find cultivars. Retracing a worthy olive’s trajectory from bottle to grove seemed like the next logical step in my journey, which is what drew my attention to Cozzaglio’s work with little-known varieties. The combination seemed irresistible.
If Cozzaglio was an efficient pruner, he also proved to be a talented oil-maker. He would start gathering olives in October—just as they began to change from green to black—at eight in the morning, using a hydraulic wand with vibrating fingers that sent the fruit tumbling from the branches onto mats on the ground. Harvesting had to be completed by four in the afternoon, so, to ensure absolute freshness, the olives could be pressed by the end of the day.
In addition to making the daily run to the mill, Galetta takes care of packaging, designing the bottles, and packing them in boxes of handmade paper. In 2015, their labels began to show up on the shelves of leading specialty boutiques in Milan, Bologna, and Rome, and La Zadruga won its first awards.Cozzaglio’s apprenticeship happened to coincide with a growing appreciation for monocultivar olive oils—made with a single olive variety, rather than a blend.
Cozzaglio found specimens of the long-lost Miniol and Negrel trees on private land, and coaxed the abandoned trees into bearing enough fruit to add to his line of monocultivar olive oils. Not even the old-timers, though, could tell him the name of the oddly shaped olive trees that grew alongside the well-preserved mosaic floors of the Roman villa by the lake.On a hunch, he sent samples of branches to the National Research Council’s Institute of Biosciences in Perugia.
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