How to choose olive oil

Extra virgin is a grade, not a vintage. The legal definition says almost nothing about whether the bottle in front of you was milled last November or three years ago. Look for a harvest date, or a campaign year, before you look for a gold sticker. Olive oil is a fresh fruit juice. It does not improve in the cupboard.

A dark glass bottle, a tin, or a bag-in-box beats a clear bottle under supermarket lights. Heat, air, and light are what turn a good oil flat. Once it is open, plan to finish a half-litre within a couple of months.

The cough at the back of the throat is oleocanthal and its cousins, the same family of phenols people are hunting when they ask for a ‘healthy’ oil. A bitter, pungent oil is not a spoiled oil. A spoiled oil smells of crayons, salami, vinegar, or wet cardboard. Those are defects. Bitterness is a style.

Competitions sort oils into delicate, medium, and robust for this reason. A delicate Arbequina is not trying to be a Coratina. Match the intensity to the food: a ripe, quiet oil for fish and mayonnaise, a bitter green oil for beans, steak, and bitter leaves.

‘Product of the European Union’ and a blend of unnamed cultivars is a commodity. It can be perfectly legal extra virgin and still be a dull bottle. A single estate, a harvest year, and a cultivar — Picual, Koroneiki, Oblica, Frantoio — is a description you can learn. Our variety pages explain what those names usually taste like. The oils attached to them in this edition are sample profiles.

A 500 ml bottle at €19 and a 375 ml bottle at €16 are not the comparison they appear to be. Convert to a litre before you decide that one brand is ‘expensive’. On this site the shelf price is shown, and a euro-per-litre figure is computed with a published sample exchange rate. That figure is for comparison. It is not part of the score. A cheap fresh Picual can outrank a costly tired blend, and it should.

A single gold medal is a weak signal. The panel met once, on one day, with one bottle. Our formula averages the strongest medals across competitions, discounts old results, and adds a laboratory panel when we have one. The sample ranking is a demonstration of that arithmetic. Do not buy a bottle because it sits at the top of a sample table. Buy a bottle whose harvest you can read, whose bitterness you like, and whose price per litre you understand.