Picholine Olives: Two Cultivars, One Name, and What the Register Protects
Picholine olives are the slim green olives most people meet in a bowl beside a drink, and the name behind them is doing more work than it looks. In the International Olive Council's World Catalogue of Olive Varieties, the entry is not filed as Picholine at all — it is Picholine du Languedoc, and it carries six synonyms, one of which is also the name of a French protected designation of origin. Several hundred miles south there is a second, separate catalogue entry called Picholine Marocaine, filed under Morocco, with a different origin and a different set of characteristics. They are not the same olive. This article sets out what each of them is, what the European register does and does not protect, and what the word on the jar actually commits a producer to.
For our own oil, see our cold-pressed organic Marrakech olive oil. We do not sell table olives, and nothing in this article is trying to sell you any.
The Short Answer
- Picholine is a cultivar name, not a designation. We pulled the full European register of geographical indications, eAmbrosia — 4,014 entries — on 2 September 2026 and filtered it. Not one registered name anywhere in it contains the word Picholine.
- The catalogue's own name for it is Picholine du Languedoc. The IOC World Catalogue files it under France with six synonyms: Coiasse, Collias, Colliasse, Couillasse, Coyas and Olive de Nîmes.
- One of those synonyms is a PDO. Olive de Nîmes, file number PDO-FR-0568, is a registered protected designation of origin for table olives, protected from 10 November 2006. The variety synonym and the designation are different kinds of thing entirely.
- There is a second Picholine, and it is Moroccan. Picholine Marocaine has its own catalogue entry, filed under Morocco, described as the product of consecutive crosses between an introduced eastern Mediterranean genotype and local wild olives of the western Mediterranean.
- The Moroccan one is enormous. The catalogue records Picholine Marocaine as about 80% of Morocco's national orchard — 74 million olive trees across almost 858,400 hectares.
- They are catalogued for different purposes. Picholine Marocaine is listed for both oil and table olives, with an oil yield of roughly 18 to 20% and oleic acid between 70 and 80%. The Picholine du Languedoc entry leaves its purpose field blank.
- The variety name on a jar is optional. Codex standard CXS 66-1981 requires the type, the trade preparation, the style and the size near the product name. The variety and the trade category are both listed as optional.
- Sidr & Stone sells olive oil, not olives. What carries across is the habit: read the register and the specification, not the adjective on the front of the pack.
What a Picholine Olive Actually Is
Picholine is a cultivar of Olea europaea L., the single olive species. Kew's Plants of the World Online carries that name as accepted under the family Oleaceae, published by Linnaeus in Species Plantarum in 1753, with seven accepted subspecies beneath it and no cultivars listed at all. Cultivar names such as Picholine are not botanical taxa; they are horticultural names for clonally propagated selections, and the register that governs them is an agricultural catalogue.
That catalogue — the IOC World Catalogue of Olive Varieties — describes the French tree as being of medium vigour, spreading in habit, with a canopy of medium density. Its fruit is of medium weight, very elongated, strongly asymmetric, with an acute apex, a nipple absent or weak, and a truncate base, turning medium violet at full maturity. That shape is the thing you can actually see in the bowl: a long, slim, pointed olive that looks nothing like a plump Kalamata.
The catalogue is also honest about what it does not hold. For Picholine du Languedoc, the origin and diffusion field, the purpose field and the agronomic notes are all empty. For a variety this famous that is a genuine gap, and we would rather report it than fill it in from marketing copy. Like every olive, the fruit is inedible off the tree — the bitterness is oleuropein, and removing it is the whole point of curing, a process our piece on olives and oil covers in general terms.
Six Names for One Tree, and One of Them Is a PDO
The catalogue lists six synonyms for Picholine du Languedoc: Coiasse, Collias, Colliasse, Couillasse, Coyas and Olive de Nîmes. Five of those are dialect variants that a grower in the Gard might use and nobody else would recognise. The sixth is a registered protected designation of origin, which makes it a different kind of word altogether.
This is the part worth slowing down for. A variety synonym describes a tree. A designation describes a place plus a specification, with a file number, a registration date and a control body behind it. When the same string of letters does both jobs, a shopper has no way of telling from the front of a pack which one is being invoked.
| The word | What it is | Register entry | What it commits anyone to |
|---|---|---|---|
| Picholine | A cultivar name in everyday use | None. No EU registered name contains it | Nothing legally binding |
| Picholine du Languedoc | The catalogue's own name for the French variety | IOC World Catalogue of Olive Varieties, France | Nothing legally. It identifies a clone, not a promise |
| Olive de Nîmes (as a synonym) | One of six catalogue synonyms for the French variety | Same catalogue entry | Nothing. A naming variant |
| Olive de Nîmes (the PDO) | A protected designation of origin for table olives | PDO-FR-0568, protected from 10 November 2006, legal instrument Official Journal L 288 of 5 November 2010 | Origin in the defined zone plus the registered specification |
| Huile d'olive de Nîmes | A separate PDO, for the oil rather than the fruit | PDO-FR-0441, protected from 18 November 2004, filed under oils and fats | A different file and a different specification from the fruit |
| Costières de Nîmes | A wine designation on the same place name | PDO-FR-A0161, protected from 15 November 1996, wine category | Nothing whatsoever about olives |
Every one of those register entries was shown as registered, with no removal flag, on the day we checked. Four of the six rows commit a producer to nothing at all, and only two of them are designations — which is a fair summary of how olive naming works generally.
Two Picholines: Languedoc and Marocaine
Here is the confusion that costs people the most, and it is not a subtle one once you have seen it. The IOC catalogue holds two separate entries. One is Picholine du Languedoc, filed under France. The other is Picholine Marocaine, filed under Morocco. They share a word and they are not the same variety.
The Moroccan entry is the more fully documented of the two. It describes Picholine Marocaine as the result of secondary diversification by consecutive crosses between an introduced domesticated genotype from the eastern Mediterranean and local wild olive trees of the western Mediterranean basin — which is to say it emerged in Morocco rather than arriving from France. It records the variety as roughly 80% of the Moroccan national orchard: 74 million olive trees across almost 858,400 hectares, from mountains to arid zones.
You will sometimes read that Picholine is the most common variety used for oil in Morocco. Read against the catalogue, that sentence is at best ambiguous and at worst a conflation: the variety that dominates Moroccan oil is Picholine Marocaine, a distinct catalogue entry with its own origin, and not the French tree of the Gard. Our guide to Moroccan olives sets out where it sits among the country's other cultivars.
| What the catalogue records | Picholine du Languedoc | Picholine Marocaine |
|---|---|---|
| Filed under | France | Morocco |
| Origin | Field left blank in the catalogue entry | Consecutive crosses between an introduced eastern Mediterranean genotype and local western Mediterranean wild olives |
| Stated purpose | Field left blank | Oil and table olives |
| Fruit | Medium weight, very elongated, strongly asymmetric, acute apex, medium violet at full maturity | Medium size, about 3 grams, with low resistance to shedding |
| Scale | Not recorded in the entry | About 80% of the Moroccan orchard; 74 million trees over almost 858,400 hectares |
| Oil | Not recorded in the entry | Yield around 18 to 20%; oleic acid 70 to 80%; stays fluid down to -12°C |
| Weaknesses noted | None recorded | Very heterogeneous; susceptible to insect pests; sensitive to peacock spot, Spilocaea oleagina |
The Moroccan entry also records something useful for anyone eating rather than milling: as a table olive, Picholine Marocaine yields the full range of preparations — Seville-style green, turning, oxidised, black and Greek-style black — and its flesh separates easily from the stone. The catalogue calls it a variety of double end, meaning it is genuinely dual-purpose rather than pressed into a second role.
What the French Register Actually Protects
If Picholine itself is not registered, the reasonable next question is what France does protect. The answer is places, not varieties.
France holds nine registered olive oil designations in the European register: Huile d'olive de Nyons (PDO-FR-0142, 21 June 1996), Huile d'olive de la Vallée des Baux-de-Provence (PDO-FR-0050, 31 August 1999), Huile d'olive de Haute-Provence (PDO-FR-0110, 19 October 2000), Huile d'olive d'Aix-en-Provence (PDO-FR-9111, 19 October 2000), Huile d'olive de Nice (PDO-FR-0322, 29 October 2003), Huile d'olive de Corse (PDO-FR-0428, 11 November 2004), Huile d'olive de Nîmes (PDO-FR-0441, 18 November 2004), Huile d'olive de Provence (PDO-FR-02421, 28 May 2018) and Huile d'olive du Languedoc (PDO-FR-2649, 1 December 2020).
It holds five registered table-olive designations: Olives noires de Nyons (PDO-FR-0374, 21 June 1996), Olives cassées de la Vallée des Baux-de-Provence (PDO-FR-0051, 27 June 1998), Olives noires de la Vallée des Baux-de-Provence (PDO-FR-0052, 27 June 1998), Olive de Nice (PDO-FR-0333, 29 October 2003) and Olive de Nîmes (PDO-FR-0568, 10 November 2006). All fourteen were shown as registered, with no removal flag, when we checked.
Fourteen designations, and not one of them is a variety name. What we cannot tell you is what each specification says about permitted cultivars, because eAmbrosia carries no English-language summary sheet against either Nîmes file. We looked, we did not find one, and we would rather say so than paraphrase a document we have not read. That is the same discipline we applied to the Tuscan register in our guide to Leccino olives, where the English application sheet did exist — and named no cultivar at all.
Reading a Jar of Picholine Olives
Section 8 of Codex standard CXS 66-1981, the international standard for table olives, sets out what belongs on a retail pack. Four things must appear as part of the product name or close to it: the type, the trade preparation, the style and the size. Two things are explicitly listed as optional — the trade category, and the name of the variety.
Picholine sits in the optional column. It is on the jar because a producer chose to put it there, and its presence is not audited by the standard. What is audited is the processing language beside it, which is why that language is the more useful thing to read.
| On the jar | Required or optional | What it actually tells you |
|---|---|---|
| "Picholine" | Optional under CXS 66-1981 | A varietal name with no register behind it — and one that belongs to two different cultivars |
| PDO mark plus Olive de Nîmes | Only where the producer holds it | Origin and specification under PDO-FR-0568 — a genuine, checkable claim |
| Trade preparation | Required | Natural, treated, dehydrated or darkened by oxidation — a real processing claim |
| Type | Required | Green, colour-turning or black, according to ripeness at harvest |
| Style and size | Required | Whole, cracked, stoned or stuffed; graded by count per kilogramme |
| Brine strength and drained weight | Set by the standard, not printed | Natural olives in brine must reach at least 6.0% sodium chloride and no more than pH 4.3; drained weight at least 50% for whole olives, 40% for stoned or stuffed |
The same logic runs on the oil shelf, where grades are governed by the International Olive Council trade standard, currently Revision 22 of June 2026. Grade is audited. Variety, in most cases, is not. Our guide to Kalamata olives shows what the exception looks like when a fruit does hold a designation of its own.
The Objections Worth Taking Seriously
"The two Picholines are close relatives, so the distinction is pedantic." They may well be related — the catalogue's own comparison tools list Picholine Marocaine among the varieties related by vigour to Picholine du Languedoc. But relatedness is not identity, and the catalogue keeps them as separate entries under separate countries with separate descriptions. The practical difference is real: a jar of French Picholine and a Moroccan oil pressed from Picholine Marocaine are two different products with one word between them.
"A PDO would tell me the olives are good." It would not. A designation ties a product to a place and a specification. It says nothing about whether this particular jar was packed last season or three years ago, how it was stored, or whether the producer is any good. Origin marks are a floor, not a verdict — and most Picholine on sale carries no designation at all.
"You sell Moroccan olive oil, so of course you talk up the Moroccan cultivar." Fair, and worth naming. We do not publish a cultivar claim for our own oil, and we do not publish a polyphenol figure for it, because we have not had it tested. Nothing in this article says Moroccan is better; it says the catalogue holds two entries and most writing about Picholine collapses them into one. That would be true whoever noticed it.
Why Sidr & Stone
We came to this the way we come to most of these pieces: a name that appears everywhere, two registers that can be checked in an afternoon, and a gap between them. That is the whole of our claim to authority here. We read the primary sources, we say plainly which ones we could not read, and we report what we found rather than what would be convenient. Our own product is oil, and it is deliberately unexciting in composition.
- Single-estate — one family-owned grove on the plains outside Marrakech, Morocco, with no blending across origins.
- Rain-fed — no irrigation; the trees take what the season gives them.
- Organically grown — no synthetic fertilisers, pesticides or herbicides. We do not hold a formal organic certificate and we do not claim one.
- Single harvest — a small batch, once a season, picked when the fruit is ready rather than when the calendar says so.
- Cold-pressed within hours of harvest — flavour, aroma and polyphenols preserved by keeping the gap between picking and pressing short.
- Unfiltered extra virgin — minimally processed, and it may show natural sediment, which is normal for an unfiltered oil.
- 100% natural — one ingredient, and nothing added to it.
- 500 ml dark glass with a gold label — protective packaging in a size built to be finished fresh.
- Halal certified, with 10% of profits to charity as a brand-wide commitment.
- Fulfilment in the UK, EU, and US.
We will not tell you Sidr & Stone is the best olive oil — that would be exactly the kind of unbacked adjective this article is about. We publish no polyphenol figure for our oil, and we would rather say so plainly than imply one. What we will say is that it is single-estate Moroccan, rain-fed, organically grown and cold-pressed within hours of harvest, and that those are things a grower can be held to.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are Picholine olives?
Picholine olives are the fruit of a French cultivar of Olea europaea catalogued by the International Olive Council as Picholine du Languedoc. The entry describes a medium-vigour, spreading tree bearing medium-weight fruit that is very elongated, strongly asymmetric, with an acute apex and a truncate base, turning medium violet at full maturity.
What do Picholine olives taste like?
They are usually picked green and sold firm and crisp, which is why they are so often served as a cocktail or aperitif olive. Flavour depends far more on harvest date and cure than on the variety name, and the IOC catalogue records no sensory profile for Picholine du Languedoc at all — that field is left blank.
Is Picholine French or Moroccan?
Both names exist and they are two different entries. Picholine du Languedoc is filed under France; Picholine Marocaine is filed under Morocco and described as arising from crosses between an introduced eastern Mediterranean genotype and local western Mediterranean wild olives. A label that says only "Picholine" does not tell you which one you have.
Is Picholine a protected designation?
No. We pulled the full eAmbrosia register of 4,014 European geographical indications on 2 September 2026 and no registered name contains the word Picholine. What is registered is the place: Olive de Nîmes, PDO-FR-0568, for table olives, and Huile d'olive de Nîmes, PDO-FR-0441, for the oil.
What is Picholine Marocaine used for?
Both oil and table olives — the catalogue calls it a variety of double end. As a table olive it yields Seville-style green, turning, oxidised, black and Greek-style black preparations, and the flesh separates easily from the stone. As an oil variety it gives a yield of roughly 18 to 20% with oleic acid between 70 and 80%.
Are Picholine olives the same as Olive de Nîmes?
The words overlap but the categories do not. Olive de Nîmes is listed as one of six synonyms for the Picholine du Languedoc cultivar, and it is separately a registered PDO for table olives from a defined French zone. A synonym identifies a tree; a designation ties a product to a place and a specification.
Does Sidr & Stone sell Picholine olives?
No. We sell a single-estate Moroccan extra virgin olive oil and no table olives of any kind. This article exists because Picholine is the clearest case we have found of one word covering two catalogued varieties and no registration, and that distinction transfers directly to the oil aisle.
Is olive oil a medicine?
No. Olive oil is a food, not a medicine. It has a long traditional history — including being honoured in the Prophetic Sunnah — and a substantial body of modern research, particularly around polyphenols, cardiovascular health, and the Mediterranean diet pattern. It can be a worthwhile part of a healthy routine, but it does not cure diseases and is not a substitute for medical care. Be cautious of any olive oil marketed with specific disease-cure claims.
Final Thoughts
Picholine is a good olive with an overloaded name. One word covers a French tree of the Gard and a Moroccan tree that accounts for four fifths of a national orchard, sits alongside five dialect synonyms nobody outside the Languedoc uses, doubles as the name of a protected designation, and carries no registration of its own anywhere in Europe. None of that is anybody's fault. It is what happens when growers name trees for centuries and lawyers arrive afterwards.
The habit that follows is small and it travels. Treat a cultivar name as useful information about a tree and weak information about a jar. Then read the words beside it that somebody had to stand behind — the trade preparation, the type, the origin, the designation if there is one, the harvest year on a bottle of oil.
Our cold-pressed organic Marrakech olive oil — single-estate, rain-fed, organically grown and unfiltered — is available to pre-order, with fulfilment in the UK, EU, and US. First harvest, limited first pressing, estimated shipping from November 2026.
Pre-Order Sidr & Stone Organic Marrakech Olive Oil — Limited First Harvest →
Disclaimer: This article describes the Picholine du Languedoc and Picholine Marocaine catalogue entries, the European geographical indications register and the Codex standard for table olives as they stood at the time of writing on 2 September 2026; register entries, catalogue entries, standards and product specifications may change, and readers should check current sources. The eAmbrosia register was pulled and filtered on that date, and eAmbrosia carried no English-language summary sheet against PDO-FR-0568 or PDO-FR-0441 when we looked. Comparisons are made in good faith and in fair terms. Olive oil is a food, not a medicine, and is not a substitute for medical treatment of any condition. For any health concern, consult a qualified medical professional.