How to read an olive oil label

A bottle of olive oil carries a strange mixture of information: a few things the law requires, a few things the producer wants you to believe, and a lot of words that exist purely to fill space. Reading a label well is mostly about telling these apart. It takes about thirty seconds once you know where to look, and it will change which bottles end up in your basket.

1. Harvest date

Start here, because it is the single most useful thing on the bottle, and also the thing least often printed. Olive oil is a fruit juice and it does not improve with age. The aromas that make a fresh oil exciting are the first thing to fade, usually within a year or so even in good storage.

If the label gives a harvest date, use it. Anything from the most recent harvest season is what you want, and a producer who prints the date is usually a producer with nothing to hide about age. If there is no harvest date, fall back on the best-before date as a rough clue. Regulations typically require it to be set somewhere between 18 and 24 months after bottling, so a best-before two years away suggests oil that was bottled recently, though the bottling date is not the harvest date, and oil can sit in a tank for months between the two.

2. Origin

Next, find out where the olives were grown. The wording here is more revealing than it looks. A label that names a single region, or better still an estate, is making a specific and checkable claim. A label that lists several countries ("a blend of European Union olive oils" is the classic) is telling you the oil came from wherever was cheapest that season, mixed in a large industrial tank.

Blends aren't automatically bad, but a multi-country blend can never tell you much about itself. When a producer knows their oil is good, they tend to put the place on the front of the bottle, not in small print on the back.

3. Olive variety

If the label names a variety or two, such as koroneiki, picual, arbequina, cobrançosa or any of the hundreds of others, that is a genuine clue to flavour. Variety is to olive oil what grape is to wine: it shapes whether the oil comes across grassy or buttery, mild or aggressively peppery. Many good producers list it; the big industrial brands usually don't, because the oil in the bottle is a moving target.

This is also the fastest way to get better at buying. When you find an oil you love, note the variety. From then on you have a shortcut: see that name on a shelf anywhere in the world and you already know a lot about what is in the bottle.

4. Packaging

Now step back from the words and look at the bottle itself. Dark glass or tin is a good sign, because light is one of the fastest ways to ruin olive oil. A beautiful clear bottle under bright supermarket lights looks appealing and is quietly working against whatever is inside. Some producers use clear glass but wrap it or box it; that is a fair compromise. A clear bottle standing in full light is not.

Size belongs here too. Once opened, oil slowly loses its brightness to air, so a big tin that takes you four months to finish is worse value than a smaller bottle you go through in six weeks, whatever the price per litre says.

5. Phrases that mean little

Finally, learn to ignore the parts of the label designed to be read and not understood. A few of the usual suspects:

• "First cold pressed" is a romantic phrase from another era. Nearly all modern oil is extracted by centrifuge, not a press, and temperatures are controlled by regulation anyway. "Cold extraction" on a modern label means roughly the same thing and tells you very little.
• "Pure", "light" and "extra light" are names for refined oils, which have been chemically processed to strip out colour, aroma and flaws. They are not extra virgin and they are not competing with it.
• "100% natural" is unregulated and essentially meaningless; it appears on refined blends too.
• "Premium", "gourmet" and "artisanal" have no definition and no test, and are used by everyone.
• A small quantity of sediment, or a note saying "unfiltered", is not a flaw, just a style choice. Filtering is about clarity, not quality.

None of these phrases disqualify a bottle on their own, and plenty of decent oils use them. But the more a label leans on adjectives, the more you should rely on the facts it isn't offering: a harvest date, a place, a variety. Producers who have those tend to say so plainly.