How to Read an Olive Oil Label

What a certified sommelier actually looks for and what the industry hopes you ignore

Most people pick up a bottle of olive oil and look at two things: the price and the country of origin. Sometimes the colour of the bottle. Maybe whether there is a picture of a Tuscan hillside on the label.

Then they put it in their trolley and go home.

This is the result of an industry that has, for decades, had very little incentive to make its labels clear. Olive oil is one of the most adulterated food products in global trade. The less a buyer understands, the easier it is to sell them something inferior at a premium price.

I am a certified olive oil sommelier. I have spent a significant amount of time learning to evaluate oil the way a wine professional evaluates wine: by chemistry, by smell, by taste, by variety. Here are the things you should pay attention to when buying your extra virgin.

A short note on fraud

The scale of olive oil adulteration in Europe is not small.

In December 2023, Spanish and Italian authorities working with Europol arrested eleven people who had adulterated more than 260,000 litres of olive oil with lampante, a grade made from damaged olives that cannot legally be sold as food, across sites in Sicily, Tuscany and Spain.

A Belgian newspaper investigation found that 20 out of 32 bottles of olive oil labelled extra virgin on Belgian supermarket shelves did not meet the quality standards required for that classification. Belgian food safety regulators opened an investigation. (Source: Olive Oil Times, October 2025)

The reason this matters beyond the obvious consumer protection argument is that adulterated oil is not just a quality problem. The health properties associated with extra virgin olive oil exist in the real product. They do not exist in refined sunflower oil with a few drops of EVOO mixed in. When you buy something that is not what it says it is, you are not getting what you paid for in any sense.

The date that matters

Best before dates on olive oil are set by producers, typically 18 to 24 months from the bottling date. “Best before” is mandatory information, but it can be misleading.

What you want is the harvest date. The month and year the olives were picked.

Extra virgin olive oil is a fresh product. It degrades over time regardless of how well it is stored. If a bottle shows no harvest date, ask yourself why. The answer is usually that the producer does not want you doing that calculation or the oil is a mix from different harvest months, possibly years.

We put the harvest month and year on every bottle of Perdisacca. We also bottle only before sale, from barrels stored under nitrogen, because we would rather you had the freshest oil we can give you than a bottle that sat in a warehouse collecting dust for a year.

Origin of production

"Product of the EU" on an olive oil label means olives from multiple countries, often multiple harvests, blended at a bottling facility somewhere in Europe. It is legal. It is not fraud. But it is not what you are paying for when you pay a premium price.

"Product of Italy" is better but still tells you nothing about the region, the estate, or the variety. Italy produces exceptional olive oil. It also produces enormous quantities of mediocre oil and imports significant volumes from Spain, Greece and Tunisia for domestic blending.

Look for “Produced by” rather than “Bottled by”. A specific region is meaningful. A named estate with a named municipality is the most honest thing a label can say, but only if all the olives that the oil comes from are from that specific location. It means someone put their address on the bottle and invited you to hold them accountable.

Ours says Bale, southwestern Istria, Croatia. That is where the trees are and the oil is made. That is the place whose soil and climate are in every bottle.

Variety

Generic commercial oil rarely names a variety because it uses whatever is cheapest and most available in a given year. When a producer names the variety, it means they grew specific trees, harvested them deliberately, and believe the variety itself is part of the product's value.

This is true. Different olive varieties taste genuinely different. The same way that a Riesling and a Chardonnay are both white wines but taste nothing alike.

We grow Buža and Rosinjola, two autochthonous Istrian varieties that have been on this specific land for centuries. They are not commercially popular. They do not yield well. We keep them because the oil they produce in this soil cannot be replicated anywhere else.

Certifications

Some certifications make a real difference. Some are marketing.

From our own experience, two are worth looking for. The EU organic logo, the green leaf with the stars, means the oil is produced under verified organic standards. It is audited. It is not a self-declaration.

The Protected Designation of Origin (PDO) is even more strict. For extra virgin olive oil in Croatia, PDO certification requires laboratory analysis of the finished oil, a controlled production method, regulated extraction temperatures, and oversight of the production steps that determine quality. A producer cannot put PDO on a bottle because they feel they deserve it. They have to prove it, every harvest.

Other logos on olive oil bottles can mean less than they look like they mean. Generic "quality" seals or vague "premium" stamps are not the same as a regulated certification with an audit trail behind it. When in doubt, look up who issues the seal and what it actually requires.

The bottle itself

Real extra virgin olive oil is sensitive to light. Prolonged exposure to sunlight or strong artificial light degrades the polyphenols and unsaturated fats that make the oil worth buying in the first place. This is not a minor concern and studies have shown measurable degradation in oils stored in clear glass under normal retail lighting conditions within weeks. (Caponio et al., 2005, Effect of the exposure to light on extra virgin olive oil quality during storage, European Food Research and Technology)

Dark glass protects the oil. A clear glass bottle on a brightly lit supermarket shelf is either a sign that the producer does not know this or does not care.

What the label cannot tell you

The most reliable test for olive oil quality is still taste.

Fresh, genuine extra virgin should smell alive, like cut grass, green tomato, sometimes artichoke or almond, occasionally a hint of something floral depending on the variety. It should taste fruity, with some bitterness mid-palate and a peppery sensation at the back of the throat.

That pepper matters. It is the presence of oleocanthal, a natural phenolic compound with anti-inflammatory properties that has been studied for its structural similarity to ibuprofen. (Beauchamp et al., 2005, Ibuprofen-like activity in extra-virgin olive oil, Nature) The stronger the pepper, the higher the oleocanthal content, the fresher and more polyphenol-rich the oil.

If your olive oil smells faintly of crayons, or tastes flat and greasy, or has no finish at all, it is either old or it was never what it claimed to be. No label can hide that once you know what to look for.

This is why origin, harvest date, named variety, and above all taste matter. They are not marketing. They are the only accountability a label can offer.

Next time you're holding a bottle, check for these four things in order: harvest date, named producer, named variety, dark glass.

If you want to taste what I have been describing, we run guided tastings at the farm in spring and summer. Bring questions. We will pour you Buža and Rosinjola side by side and you can decide for yourself whether the pepper is real.

Sources referenced:

Caponio et al. (2005). Effect of the exposure to light on extra virgin olive oil quality during storage. European Food Research and Technology

Beauchamp et al. (2005). Ibuprofen-like activity in extra-virgin olive oil. Nature

Source: European Commission EU Alert and Cooperation Network, 2024; reported by The Guardian, July 2024 https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jul/29/olive-oil-fraud-mislabelling-cases-record-high-eu

Olive Oil Times, October 2025, https://www.oliveoiltimes.com/business/europe/regulators-investigate-after-newspaper-identifies-olive-oil-fraud-in-belgium/141888