🫒 Coratina

Coratina is an olive cultivar from Apulia grown for oil and named after the town of Corato; its synonyms include Cima di Corato, Coratese and Racioppa di Corato. According to the World Catalogue of Olive Varieties of the International Olive Council (IOC), it is the most important Italian cultivar: in Apulia it covers about 70,000 hectares, 60,000 of them in the province of Bari and 10,000 in Foggia.

Coratina probably descends from the cultivars Frantoio and Lezze. It is also grown in other regions of Italy and in countries where olives are a recent arrival: in Argentina — in Catamarca, La Rioja, San Juan and Mendoza; in Israel — as a pollinator and to add flavour to oil.

The tree comes into bearing early: by the fifth year it has yielded a cumulative 17.4 kg of fruit. The cultivar is poorly self-pollinated, flowers early and ripens late. The fruits detach relatively easily, so they suit machine harvesting. Coratina tolerates cold well but is very susceptible to the olive fruit fly.

Its main value is the oil. The oil yield is 20–23% depending on harvest time, oleic acid makes up 77%, and polyphenols are very abundant: in one study, unfiltered Coratina oil contained about 680 mg of phenols per kilogram. In some years the fruits also suit green olives in brine.

What to look for on the bottle. The marked bitterness and peppery catch in the throat of Coratina oil point to polyphenols, not a defect; the IOC method counts them as positive attributes. The EU allows a polyphenol claim only when 20 g of oil holds at least 5 mg of them, so check the label for that wording.