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I’m not a professional olive oil expert. I’m just a sucker for good oil. I consume insane amounts, and I’ve been to more oil festivals and olive farms than wine ones. I also live in Tuscany, and I am that idiot who thinks a small village’s olive harvest festival with 10 farmers selling their oils is one of the best weekend programs, and I am totally fine driving an hour for these events. Lastly, almost all of you who write about olive oil, talking about brands and what and which to buy, you are all missing some key points. So, here’s this article for you.
I’m going to answer the title’s question right away. You buy olive oil with two practices combined together: hyperlocality and taste. Before you panic, both can be learned, and both are location agnostic, meaning you don’t have to be in Italy, though it obviously helps if you are here rather than in, I don’t know, San Diego.
I am also trying to hold myself back and not nerd out too much over olive oil. But I can’t make promises, so this article might be a bit too much for those who just want the simple answers and a brand list to buy. You’ve been warned.
Anyways, let’s start with the objective part: taste. Yeah, you wouldn’t have guessed that this would be the objective part, would you, haha?
What does good olive oil taste like?
First of all, it’s not wine. So forget whatever you know about wine. Doesn’t apply here because oil is a juice. It peaks in months, fades within the year. Exactly the opposite life from wine. Also, please note that some of the rules below are general rules.
Again, I promised myself and you that I won’t nerd out too much, but let’s state it cleanly: if you really know what you’re tasting, you can tell where the oil is coming from without looking at the bottle. But we don’t go this deep here, simply because this is a write-up, not a course. Also, you need to actually taste a lot to know what I’m talking about. Hence why most rules are general rules that apply to most oils. Let’s go.
A good oil is fresh, defect-free, and alive. I told you about fresh before, it’s the opposite of wine. A good oil is from the current harvest. It’s August 2026, around the 20th, when I write this article. The oil in my kitchen is from the autumn 2025 harvest, the only harvest that exists right now, and in two months the new one arrives and this one gets demoted to the frying pan. Oil from 2024? I wouldn’t put it in my mouth.
Defect-free means that you can literally taste if the oil is crap. If you taste or smell old nuts, anything vinegary, or a damp cellar, it means the fruit was bad or badly handled, or it’s a fraudulent product (more on olive oil fraud later).
Alive means it fills your mouth when you taste it, as it should for olive oil. It smells like grass, artichoke, or green leaves. It’s bitter on the back of your tongue. It’s peppery in your throat. If it’s smooth like butter, mild in taste, and smells like nothing, you are tasting a dead oil.
In other words, if you taste your oil and it smells nutty, smooth in your mouth like unsalted melted margarine, and you can drink a small cup without choking on it, congratulations: you’ve bought and tasted a dead, horrible, and shitty oil. If you have shouted “uuuuuhm, this oil is so smooth, it tastes extra virgin!”, congratulations, you have absolutely no clue whatsoever what good oil tastes like.
How you taste oil matters, too. There are two schools, just like for wine tasting. One is the sommelier route. And yes, olive oil sommeliers exist, they are called assaggiatori, there are courses and diplomas and everything, because of course there are, this is Italy.
Professionals who taste oil in panels have a very rigid technique that goes like this. The oil goes into small tasting glasses tinted blue, so the color won’t bias you. Smell first. If it smells grassy, tomato leaf, unripe banana, or anything green, it means it’s fresh, so you can continue. If it smells like nail polish, vinegar, wine, mold, cellar, crayons, or half-year-old walnuts, throw it out. Warm it in your hands before tasting it because taste peaks at room temperature. Swirl, sniff, kinda like wine tasting. Then suck it up through your teeth, aka slurp it up, let it coat the tongue, then swallow. The front of your mouth should taste like grass and greens (fresh oil), the back of your tongue should be bitter (polyphenols), and your throat should scream from pungent, pepper-like notes (oleocanthal). Coughing is normal. It’s almost like a certificate of oleocanthal levels.
The other school is similar, but more grounded. Almost all oil festivals use the grounded version, and personally, I think it is the best because you are not a scientist and it is not that serious anyway. This version comes with bread. You put some oil on the bread or cracker, and you eat it. Ideally, it’s unsalted, unflavored, neutral bread. Tuscan saltless bread is made for this. It carries the oil, and that’s how it’s done in real life anyway. Only zealots like myself eat olive oil on its own with a shot glass. Normal people like yourself will eat it with food.
Slightly related, but to cut through the age-old debate on which type of olive oil is good for what plate, here are some basic rules.
The “type of oil” is nonsense. There is olive oil, and there is non-olive oil. Olive oil has no types. It has intensity levels. Intensity comes from the amount of polyphenols and oleocanthal, aka how bitter and peppery the oil is.
The golden rule is to match the oil’s intensity with the dish’s intensity.
Dark, high-intensity oils work well on bitter greens, hearty soups, beans, red meat, and anything where the oil is more like a topping. Raw only, poured at the table, never cooked with the food. Most Tuscan oils are like this, by the way, and this is also my favorite. My rule: if I cough twice after a shot of oil, it’s golden for me.
Medium-intensity oils are your generic house oil. Salads, veggies, fish, and this is what you put on your pasta (after cooking!).
Low-intensity ones are great with raw fish, eggs, baked stuff, and the really mild ones are great for cooking. On the cooking: you can cook with any of these, even the hardcore high-intensity ones. It’s just burning money. High heat destroys the polyphenols, which make olive oil not just taste great, but also be healthy. Low-intensity oils are cheaper, better to cook with, not because they are better as a cooking ingredient, but because it’s just more economical to cook with them.
Some other stuff to know about. Extra virgin olive oil. It has nothing to do with locality or taste, because it’s a legally defined term. It means no chemicals, no refining, mechanically extracted, and free acidity below 0.8%. It also means it has no defects I described above, and a panel of tasters verifies the “free from defects” claim. So, to be frank, if you see this on the bottle, it just means that it is not some random flower oil marketed as olive oil (hopefully). It also means that if you don’t see this on the bottle, you should probably throw it out, because the producer couldn’t care less and didn’t meet even the most basic requirements of quality.
Another biggie is cold pressing or cold extraction, I see that in every marketing material nowadays. Most people think it’s the same, but most people have never tasted proper olive oil, so that’s about most people’s opinions.
Cold extraction means that the oil is extracted at under 27 Celsius, which preserves aromatics and polyphenols. Since I just explained what good oil tastes like, cold extraction is a basic requirement for good oil. The producers who make good oil usually don’t even bother stating it, because it is that basic. Saying your oil is cold-extracted is like saying, “our chicken meat is free from antibiotics.” Of course it is, dummy, would you eat a chicken pumped up with chems?
Cold pressing, on the other hand, means mat-pressed. It’s how people made oil before machines. Almost all oil in this world (olive or not) is produced via centrifuges, and it’s totally fine. As a business, almost impossible to become profitable if you are still cold pressing your oil. That said, some farmers still do it this way, especially in Italy, but they sell such small batches that they can only be profitable because of hyperlocality.
Speaking of hyperlocality, let’s jump to the second practice, because now you have the knowledge to tell whether an oil is good or not once you open the bottle and pour it out. Hyperlocality teaches you one thing only: should you even consider opening that bottle for testing?
Campanilismo in olive oil
If you are a reader of this publication, you are bored by this word by now: hyperlocality. Or, campanilismo. It’s like part of Italian genetics, and you breathe this here in the air. It means: the best food (or anything, really) has traveled not more than the nearest town. Every ingredient, recipe, part, product, anything is locally produced, sourced, and sold.
This is true for olive oil. Allow me to illustrate with two examples.
In the USA, Canada, Britain, and, to be honest, most countries in the world, you have the same condiments on a table, right? Ketchup, mayo, BBQ sauce, mustard. If you are in Britain, you might also keep apple cider vinegar. If you are in Canada, you might have maple syrup there. If you are in Asia, soy sauce. Southern countries? Maybe some chili sauce. In Italy, it’s usually two things: balsamic vinegar and olive oil. Because balsamic vinegar has a longer shelf life than olive oil (remember, good oil is less than a year old), it’s usually the same brands, often from the same places (mostly Modena). Like most condiments in other countries, your ketchup and mayo are usually from the same 3-4 brands worldwide.
This is not true for olive oil. In all serious Italian restaurants, the olive oil situation is the same: local oil, from a local producer. The more local the restaurant is, the smaller the olive oil producer on the table. At bare minimum, the oil is from the region at least. Hopefully, it’s from the same province. At best, it’s from the nearest town.
Quick note on the olive oil market. Spain is the number one producer of olive oil because of one thing: they have the land. Spain has industrial-scale ranches, and they produce industrial-scale oil. That brings money and buying power.
In Italy, the production itself is unbelievably fragmented, mostly because of two things: hyperlocalism and geography. Italy doesn’t have much land that lets any farmer grow their farm to industrial scale. So, Italy has more than half a million farmers who grow olives and around 4,000 olive mills (frantoi) that make olive oil. Meanwhile, Spain produces twice as much oil as Italy with half the number of growers and mills.
Spain also owns most of the national and international olive oil brands that you might know as Italian. Well, technically, they are Italian, but they are Spanish-owned. Bertolli, Carapelli, Sasso, all names you might recognize, and all owned by Deoleo, headquartered in Córdoba. But they are a bottler, not a producer. Kinda like blended whisky, the largest brand names are blended oils. Blending is the most prone to fraud, but more on that later. In the EU, Portugal and Greece are also producers, but both usually end up in Spanish- and Italian-branded bottles as blends. It doesn’t mean they are bad, they are just less significant outside of their local market.
If you are not consuming your olive oil in your local restaurant, you are buying the bottle. And this is my second example. Let me show you one of my favorite olive oils:
You might recognize a couple of things. No label. Zero. Like, literally, the bottle itself has a label that says it’s a metal bottle especially made to preserve olive oil. I buy it up in the mountains in Lunigiana, from a guy whose friend (Marco) has a farm in the Aulella River valley. The guy who sells it also has an amazing homemade amaro, just saying. It’s very pungent. I don’t remember the price, which means it is very, very cheap (below 10 EUR).
I know, I know. How is this useful? It isn’t. Not everything has to be, hello. I’m an extremist in this. But I promised you could do this from a sleepy town in Oklahoma, and you could replicate similar results without buying from Marco in the mountains. So, here are your rules.
Remember, these rules are for those who want to buy good-quality olive oil off the shelf in almost any retailer or online. The best oil comes from Marco from the mountains, and it never touches any supermarket shelf. But most of us have no Marco around, only a Walmart, Amazon, or equivalent.
To illustrate, let’s pick a popular star of the show, Bryan Johnson’s oil. Stuff he says on his site about this oil:
It is from Portugal, single source, which means it is not blended.
It costs around 47 EUR per 1 bottle (750ml).
It is harvested in November, 2025.
It is peppery and smooth, as it is claimed on the site.
Most of my readers are from the USA, so let’s start the rules with the money. Good olive oil shouldn’t cost less than $15 per bottle. Why? Because retailers need to make money. At least 3 players take a margin here: the bottler, logistics, and the retailer. You can’t make money on a $9 bottle that claims “extra virgin 100% Italian oil.” It’s probably a fraud or a scam. So $15 is the floor of honesty. But there’s also a ceiling: $20-30 buys you excellent oil, and above that you’re paying for the story, not the juice. Bryan sells his for around $50, which is outrageously expensive. But it’s Bryan. If he packaged and sold sea salt for you at $50 per kilo, you would buy it anyway. Thumbs up, Bryan! Let the minions pay!
Second rule: harvest date. Not “best by,” harvest date. The crop, the olives, when were they harvested? What year and month? If the bottle doesn’t carry this, ciao. This rule kills 95% of your bottles on the shelf. Most brands don’t even have this information on their bottles. Bryan has it, so good job there, it’s also a fresh harvest, nice.
Then, location. Where was it harvested? The smaller, the better. Descending order of trust is this:
Single farm/estate > DOP/IGP certification > single region > “100% [country]” > “Product of [country]” > continent/nothing.
Frankly, in almost all cases, if the location is as broad as a country, it’s a red flag. And here’s the trap in the wording, because the two country-level phrases are not the same. “100% Italian” is the regulated claim: the olives were grown in Italy and milled in Italy. It’s the strongest country-level statement the law allows. “Product of Italy,” “Bottled in Italy,” “Packed in Italy,” on the other hand, can legally mean the oil arrived in a tanker and only the bottle is Italian. This is where the imported stuff hides: bottles like these often carry Greek, Spanish, or Portuguese oil, and that is the best-case scenario. If it’s Spanish bulk, it’s often topped up with North African product. Oh, you might ask why this is a problem? Well, because the EU regulates how olives can be grown, what you can say, and what you can’t. Outside the EU, the rules are looser, and the oil is very affordable. Guess why. The location is usually in the small print, so read that label carefully. Bryan’s oil says “Product of Portugal” (older bottles said “Product of Spain” so he might have switched producers), which means the oil was grown, milled, and bottled in Portugal. It also says that it’s a single source, so he probably has a farm or estate as a dealer. All great stuff if true!
Next rule: the bottle color. The darker the bottle, the better. I’ve said it with cold extraction: temperature kills quality, and so does light. During shipping, the bottle sees a lot of light, not to mention the well-lit shelves of grocery shops. Light slowly degrades the oil, so good-quality producers ship their products in dark bottles. Of course, some producers sell oil in clear bottles, but those are local products expected to be consumed within months after bottling. We are talking about your big-mall shop’s shelf, not about Marco’s oil. Bryan’s snake oil comes in a black bottle, so thumbs up.
Not technically a rule, more like a practice: completely ignore the front label. It’s just advertising. Cold-pressed, cold-extracted, extra virgin, pure, the farmhouse, the nonna smiling, the flag, these are all mostly bullshit marketing, or basic qualities of any good product. I’ve said this above: a good-quality oil is cold-extracted, extra virgin, and pure. If it isn’t, it’s hard to consider it olive oil at all. Writing it on the front label is like labeling a bag of nuts as “vegan” just to appeal to vegans. All you need to know about your oil is on the back label, in the small print. The smaller it is printed, the more important it is to be honest. Bryan’s oil is minimalistic, it says the brand name, his name, the blueprint, and “premium extra virgin olive oil.” Again, I haven’t tested it, but it’s better than Bertolli, which said nothing about the oil and everything about Italian-heritage bullshit.
Also not a rule, more like a practice: buy the size you’ll actually finish. Here in Italy, locals buy 5-liter tins, because a household empties one in a couple of months and the tin never has time to go off. That’s how I buy too. But if you’re buying one bottle for occasional salads, get the 750ml and consume it within weeks of opening. It’s not wine, soda, or water. It’s fruit juice without preservatives. The 5-liter can sitting on a counter for a year will go rancid, and then you’ll think that’s what olive oil tastes like, and we’re back to square one. Bryan’s oil is the standard small batch.
Lastly, about the blended oils. This is the grey area. I’ve said this above, but I’ll repeat it here: anything blended is often lower quality than single-sourced oils. Same with whisky. Johnnie Walker, a famous blended whisky, is amazing, but it won’t command the same quality and price as a single-malt, single-distillery brand. Oil is the same. But unlike whisky, where the distillation (the production of the actual end product) is more important than the sourcing (the harvesting of the crop), in oil, it’s the opposite. I wouldn’t say how the oil is processed from the olives is unimportant, but it is a fairly straightforward, industrialized process. What’s totally important: where the olives come from and how they are cultivated. Bryan’s oil says it’s from a single source, so probably not blended.
I can’t stress enough that olives are a fruit, and olive oil doesn’t go through distillation. It’s a juice, which means the cultivation absolutely influences the product. Yes, in wine, this is also true: the notes of the wine come from the notes of the grape, which come from the type of grape, the soil, and the geography itself, but in fruit juices, there is no filter that numbs the end product, there is no distillation.
My Dad makes his money from a large orchard where he grows mostly peaches and cherries, so I know some stuff about this topic indirectly. How you cultivate your fruits matters. How many pesticides you use, and if so, which ones? How do you care for your trees, and what techniques do you have? Do you use any additives, organic or not? What’s in your soil, and how do you manage that soil? Small things, but it’s night and day in the end result.
All in all, if something is blended, it means you can’t trace it. If you can’t trace it, you can’t guarantee it. In Italy, most people buy local oils from local producers. Most restaurants serve local oils from local farms. Mostly because it is just cheaper to do. The entire harvest from a local farmer, milled and bottled in the nearest town, costs half the price of a brand-name delivery. It is also probably organic, since the farmer’s land is small and they only sell to locals, and because it is bottled and sold right after harvest, it is also the freshest. Low price meets amazing quality, but the model can’t be scaled, not even to national levels, let alone for export.
So on exported oils, you trade Marco for the small print on the label. You can trace Marco, because you know him. But if it’s a blended oil with only a “Product of Italy” on it, how do you know what’s in your bottle? You don’t. And this is where we need to talk about the olive oil scam, or the fraud.
Avoiding the bad batch
Americans tend to joke about Europe, saying it is against growth because of too much product regulation. As a European, I think almost all American problems are the direct consequence of zero regulation, but that’s a whole other discussion to have. Long story short, since the mid-2000s, the EU has regulated olive oil with rules of origin. The label must state where the olives were grown and where they were milled. The EU also regulates olive cultivation. You can’t just use any pesticides, and whatever you do in the USA with companies like Cargill and Monsanto is mostly illegal in the EU for most farmers. You might have a free market, but we just prefer to have fewer cancer patients, sorry.
Let’s play the worst-case but legal scenario: Tunisian olive oil, grown and milled in Tunisia, bottled in Italy. The cultivation happened under whatever rules Tunisia enforces, which, at least on pesticides, are looser than the EU’s. But hey, it’s bottled in Italy, at least. So the label should say “blend of non-EU oils” somewhere. It can say bottled in Italy, packed in Italy, but it cannot say “Product of Italy,” and it absolutely cannot say “100% Italian.” Why? For those claims, the olives must be grown and milled in Italy.
So where’s the grey zone? Remember my rule on ignoring the front label? There you go. Let’s do Bertolli as an illustration, because everyone knows them.
I don’t even have to taste this. I see so many red flags. Doesn’t even bother saying “virgin” or “extra virgin,” which means it's the refined cooking-grade stuff. It doesn’t say where it is from, not even a country. Yet we see a Renaissance dude hand-picking olives from a tree, and an Italian family name with a crest. I’m crying, really.
The founder was Francesco Bertolli, from Lucca, Tuscany, in the 19th century. The bottle screams Italy: the colors, the family crest, the name, the dal 1865. It’s a masterpiece of marketing. It even tells you how to use it (for salads, dressings, etc.), that it is rich in vitamin E (like any olive oil…), and in the back it says that it's verified GMO-free (which just means it’s from the EU, because hello wake up in the EU GMO-stuff is illegal).
They don’t even say nowadays that it is “Product of Italy” or “Imported from Italy”, because they got sued for it before. Why? The oil has historically been a mix of cheap Spanish and Greek oil with non-EU oil, mostly Tunisian. Maybe they bottle it in Italy, I don’t know. Doesn’t really matter at this point. So… does it make Bertolli illegal or a scam? No. Does this mean that Bertolli is a fantastic product of Italy? Well…
I would say this is a grey area, where you are using marketing as a cover story to sell and overprice something ordinary. In court, you are still good. But there are two other routes that aren't grey: 100% scam, and you go to jail for it. Yet, you can still end up buying these from the shelf.
You can tamper with the origin or with the quality. Origin first. You buy junk non-EU olive oil for pennies in a tanker. The tanker unloads at the harbor, but by the time it arrives at the bottling factory, it has magically become Italian oil on paper, through some wonderful intermediary chaps. In the cases prosecutors have cracked open, those intermediaries turned out to be shell companies, some of them fronting for organized crime. It pays well, since non-EU oil sells for pennies while Italian olive oil commands the highest price on the market, so the margin is insane even on one tanker.
The other illegal option is quality: you dilute the product with cheap, super-low-quality oil, in the horror stories even with deodorized lamp oil, which is legally inedible. The original batch goes through panel verification, it’s genuinely extra virgin, nothing funky with the brand. Then, somewhere before bottling and shipping, the batch gets stretched. The bottled product is virgin at best, not extra virgin, and inedible at worst. There are old horror stories with chlorophyll and beta-carotene too, seed oil dressed up as olive oil. That’s not just lying about origin and making money on a scam. That literally harms people with inedible products. Both of these options mean fines or even jail.
And this is not a back-alley business. That’s why some panels verify post-bottling, and yes, big brands have failed these verifications.
In 2015, an Italian consumer magazine lab-tested twenty of the best-selling “extra virgin” bottles on supermarket shelves, and nearly half failed the taste panel. The prosecutor’s office in Turin repeated the tests with the customs laboratory and confirmed it. Seven brands were investigated for fraud in commerce, including Bertolli, Carapelli, Sasso, Coricelli, Santa Sabina, Primadonna, and Antica Badia. Those last two are exclusive to Lidl and Eurospin, big-brand supermarkets. And you’ve probably heard about Bertolli, Sasso, and Carapelli. So it’s not some no-name brand from your local deli. Big boyz club with big boyz money. The oil in the bottles was virgin, not extra virgin, sold at extra virgin prices. And notice the beautiful detail: the paperwork on all of it was in perfect order. What caught them was a panel of trained human tongues, which is a legally binding instrument in the EU. You can fool Excel, but you can’t fool a panel of oil experts.
Oh, and the results of this example investigation? Fines of 300,000 to 500,000 EUR for unfair commercial practices. For a group like Deoleo (owner of Bertolli and Carapelli), that’s less than a parking ticket, a rounding error. Of course, their reputation was on the line (not that it was splendid before this anyway), so they put out full-page ads promising new quality criteria, basically an apology to Italians. This is just one example, there are many. And if you go for the lesser-known brand names, the murkier it gets.
But I hope you can feel the irony here. Big brands like Bertolli were exactly what Marco is today. A local family that produced olive oil and sold it locally. Francesco Bertolli had a shop in Lucca and a surname worth something. Then the surname outlived the family, got sold, and became a costume, nothing more.
So where can you buy the good oil? Buy from single estates in California. Buy from webshops that sell only olive oil, or that import certified oil from Europe with harvest dates printed on the bottle. But what matters more than a brand list is taste: practice, learn, and know what good olive oil tastes like. Since one bottle costs you $20-30, it is inexpensive to practice. Open the bottle. Taste it. If it tastes bad, it’s a bad batch, throw it out. If it tastes good, buy that bottle again.
As you can see, you can fake anything with the right papers and the right marketing. If the oil label talks more about salad dressings and Italian heritage than it does about the harvest date and the estate’s name, you should know something is off.
But in the end, it doesn’t matter what’s on the label. The biggest oil fraud case in Italy wasn’t cracked by an audit. It was cracked by people tasting. Your taste is more important than any spreadsheet or label work. The spreadsheet can be faked. Your tongue can’t.
