Nicolas Alziari
Nicolas Alziari is the olive oil house of Nice. Its mill in the Madeleine district has been pressing olives since 1868, its shop on rue Saint-François-de-Paule sits beside the Cours Saleya market, and its brightly painted tins are one of the most recognizable objects in French gourmet grocery. The house grows, mills, blends and tins its own extra virgin oils around the Cailletier olive of the Nice hills. Clipperton imports the Prestige, Pauline and César oils along with the house's pourer and cruet.
The house
The story starts in 1868, when César Martin, from a family of launderers, bought an abandoned mill known as the Santa in the Madeleine district of Nice and put it back to work. His son-in-law, Nicolas Alziari, gave the house its name and its idea: early in the twentieth century he began blending olive oils from different origins the way a wine or champagne house assembles a cuvée, a bold idea at the time. His wife Jeanne opened the shops in town, including the one on rue Saint-François-de-Paule, and ran the mill on her own while Nicolas was at the front during the First World War.
Their children Pauline and Ludovic took over the shop and the mill in turn, and in the 1970s and 1980s Nicolas's grandson Jean Nègre and his wife Andrée broadened the range and made Alziari a name in French gastronomy. In 1991 Gilles Piot, a distant relative, bought the shop and the mill and kept them together. His sons David and Vincent, who had worked alongside him for fourteen years, took the reins in 2019.
Today the house farms around two hundred hectares of olive groves, some sixty on the Côte d'Azur and the rest in Provence, and follows the oil from tree to tin. The historic mill on boulevard de la Madeleine is the last olive mill still working in Nice; it runs during the harvest, from November to March, and offers free guided visits all year round. A second, modern mill handles the cold-pressed oils and has taken a gold medal at the Concours Général Agricole.
What they make
Three oils are on Clipperton, each in the house tin. The Prestige Olive Oil is the signature blend: fruity, sweet and delicate, assembled in Nice from selected European olives, and available in 250 ml, 500 ml and one-liter tins. The Pauline Olive Oil is certified organic and greener and livelier on the palate. The César Olive Oil is the estate oil: first cold pressing of Cailletier olives from the Alziari groves, certified PDO Nice, golden in color with notes of dried herbs, artichoke and almond.
To go with them, the house offers a Cork Pourer in natural cork and chrome that fits every size of tin, and a limited-edition metal cruet in the shape of a watering can, sold empty and painted in the Alziari colors. Browse the whole Nicolas Alziari collection.
Why Clipperton chose them
Clipperton is a family importer, and we look for houses that are still rooted in one place after generations. Alziari is Nice in a tin: the same mill since 1868, the same olive, a shop the city has walked past for a century. We work with the house directly so that the tins on Canadian and American shelves come straight from the Madeleine mill, and so that an everyday olive oil with a real story can sit beside the estate oils on your counter.
