100% Italian Extra Virgin Olive Oil, Here’s How to Recognize It

Italy is a heavily olive-growing nation, and most ofItaly’s extra virgin olive oil comes from the south of the peninsula (85 percent of the total): Apulia, Calabria, Campania and Sicily. Extra virgin olive oil is an indispensable food in children’s diets and should be introduced from the earliest stages of weaning, that is, as early as around 6 months. It, in fact, contributes to bone formation, the process of myelination of the brain and growth; it is also an excellent aid for immune defenses.

INDEX

• 3 Elements for Recognizing 100% Italian Extra Virgin Olive Oil
• Other aspects to understand if an Extra Virgin Olive Oil is 100% Italian
• History of Italian Oil
• Characteristics of Italian Extra Virgin Olive Oil
• Differences with foreign oil
• Counterfeit Tunisian Oil Truth or Legend
• Standards and Regulations for Oil
• EEC REGULATION 1531/2001
• Differences in Italy/Foreign Production

3 Elements for Recognizing 100% Italian Extra Virgin Olive Oil

First of all, it is fair to consider the fact that we need to know how to recognize an olive oil and its origin. Here we see exactly how to do it to understand whether the oil we are about to buy is Italian or not.

1. The label: reading the label thoroughly, which may seem like the most obvious thing but is too often underestimated. According to current laws on control of the oil production chain (more generally on everything food) producers are obliged to include the country of origin of the raw material (olives in this case) and its processing, under penalty of heavy fines up to withdrawal of the product from the market and warning by the body in charge of control.
2. Price: a very good quality extra virgin olive oil costs from 8€ to 12€ per liter. What costs less than that is either not Italian or is mixed with oils of dubious origin!
3. Sensory Evaluation: by this term we mean that evaluation that would usually be made through the smell and taste of olive oil. To carry it out it will be enough to smell thoroughly the oil poured into a glass in minimal quantities, although this evaluation is much more complicated and more “expert” let’s say. The same goes for tasting the oil, a good oil, especially if it is new oil, will have to pinch slightly and be a little bitter.

Other aspects to understand if an Extra Virgin Olive Oil is 100% Italian

We can identify an Italian Extra Virgin Olive Oil according to certain guidelines, namely:

• History
• Features
• Differences with foreign oil
• Tunisian oil
• Rules and regulations
• EEC Regulation 1531/2001
• Italy/Foreign production differences

Let us now go on to analyze each of them in detail:

History of Italian Oil

Italian Extra Virgin Olive Oil, is anItalian excellence recognized all over the world, thanks to its Mediterranean climate. A product that has numerous beneficial properties, making it a fundamental element for a healthy and balanced diet. It is the precious gift of a widespread plant now known worldwide as the “GREEN GOLD” on our tables and a symbol of the Mediterranean civilization. But its history is lost in the centuries, in the millennia. It involves different spaces, peoples and cultures. It has marked traditions and economies of entire communities.

The roots of this history lie in the Middle East. The oldest oil mills, dating back several millennia before Christ, have been found in Palestine. It then spread to Egypt, Crete, Attica and throughout the Mediterranean basin by the Phoenicians, Greeks and Carthaginians. In fact, it was the Greeks who introduced it to Italy around 1000 B.C.E.,and the Etruscans who cultivated it and named its most precious fruit, “ELEIVA,” the Oil.

The Romans then spread the techniques of cultivation, pressing and preservation throughout the conquered countries. Over the centuries, olive groves thus became a feature of our country. As shown by the tools and archaeological finds unearthed over the years, oil has always been present in the customs and rituals of everyday life.

Today, for us, oil is above all a precious food, healthy, genuine, tasty and unfailing condiment on all our tables typical of Mediterranean cuisine. This is where our oil comes from, a delicious flavor of our present and the fruit of the experience of the past.

In fact, Italian extra virgin olive oil preserves all the ancient flavor born of a remote wisdom and coming from a long history that preserves the secret of the genuineness and deliciousness of a pure and valuable extra virgin oil, because the best things are always the simplest and the most natural.

Characteristics of Italian Extra Virgin Olive Oil

Each oil is linked to its own territory, and thus synthesizes each native cultivar (variety) of olives from which it is produced. There are hundreds of varieties of olives, which have different shapes and sizes and are characterized by a different ratio of kernel to pulp and thus a variable average oil content. Their productivity depends on a great many factors, climatic and cultural, that determine full production.

Extra Virgin Olive Oil, also known as EVO Oil, refers to an oil obtained from the pressing of olives, the fruit of the Olea europea Leccino plant (better known as the olive tree).Extra virgin olive oil extraction processes can only take place mechanically, without the use of chemicals.

To defend against counterfeiting, Protected Designation of Origin(PDO) and Protected Geographical Indication(PGI) marks were established, which require the use of traditional techniques and restrictive and strict standards (compliance with which is guaranteed by an independent control body), with the intention of guaranteeing a superior quality product. With this guarantee, it is possible to choose real Italian extra virgin olive oil by tracing its true, certified, high quality origin from the first olive supply chain.

The quality of an olive oil depends on many factors: the cultivar, the condition of the olive tree and fruit at the time of harvest, the technology followed in production, harvesting and extraction, and storage conditions.

To achieve the highest quality and organoleptic specificity, state-of-the-art technologies are used, without forgetting local traditions and specificities.

For olive oil to be called virgin, it must be obtained from the fruit of the olive tree only by mechanical processes, under conditions, especially temperature, that do not cause alterations in the oil. An “extra virgin” olive oil must have an oleic acid content (degree of acidity) of less than 0.8 percent.

Read also: Composition of Olive Oil What Are Fatty Acids

Differences with foreign oil

What producers are terribly concerned about is that with a poor domestic harvest, there is a huge import of foreign oils, and all this would cause great economic damage. Italy is still the world’s second-largest oil producer after Spain, but there are booming countries such as North African countries, California, Australia, South Africa and Chile. And it is precisely from these countries that oil is taken when it is lacking in Italy, but often the quality is not as excellent as ours, and the labels printed on the bottles clearly show this.

The parliamentary document analyzes the main phenomena of malfeasance. A disturbing sampling that ranges from product alterations to outright adulteration. Among the most widespread practices is the so-called “paper oil.” These are fictitious productions of extra virgin oil, supported by false invoicing, through which “foreign olive oils are introduced into our country, which are thus included among Italian extra virgin productions and marketed as oils of Italian origin.” It is a phenomenon that until a few years ago was close to 100-200 thousand tons per year (up to 30 percent more than actual production). But which in recent times-especially thanks to the introduction of the National Agricultural Information Service-seems to have been reduced “to a few tens of thousands of tons.”

Also important is the fact that harvesting is done by hand instead of machines; usually, in our country it is done by hand. It is also true that this way all the olives are harvested and not only those that fall induced by the machine, which are then the most fragile ones.

In fact, the olives are harvested on nets, beating the branches with sticks, to encourage the fruit to fall apart, but there is also hand picking with ladders, which allows only intact and ripe fruit to be chosen, in order to obtain a fragrant olive oil free of unpleasant odors.

Ideally, you should buy oils where you can taste them and understand their characteristics, so best from the olive producer directly, at olive mills, Campagna Amica markets or specialty stores such as oil stores.

Even when we are at a restaurant we demand that oil be served to us in bottles labeled and with a tamper-proof cap as required by law, oil jars are prohibited.

Counterfeit Tunisian Oil Truth or Legend

Companies in Italy that are discovered to be selling counterfeit extra virgin olive oils are now commonplace, increasingly trying to sell Tunisian oil by passing it off as Italian, but there is a clear difference in quality between the two related to the entire supply chain.

While some artisanal mills still produce quality oil, large companies often take advantage of the low price of foreign product to resell it as EU oil and pass it off, behind their label, as Italian oil. Obviously the consumer will be attracted by the low price and the false labeling but will not cook with high quality, Italian oil.

We are being invaded by Tunisian oil, which has quadrupled in just a few months. And Italian producers have warehouses full of unsold extra virgin. An exemplary story about how we are hurting ourselves, bringing a strategic sector of the national economy to its knees. And how we fail to defend our interests in Europe. The competition game is lost at the start: Tunisian oil costs 2 euros, Italian oil 8 euros. Under a series of agreements made in the European Union with Tunisia, there are still large margins of oil that the Tunisians can safely sell in our markets, recovering quotas that they have not yet fully exploited.

Two out of every three bottles that end up on Italian tables contain Tunisian, Spanish and Greek oil. An absurd waste of wealth, welfare and labor. A deadly blow to our agriculture, on which, by the way, so many of our young people are courageously betting. In particular, then the consumer is greatly harmed, since on the label of Tunisian oil it is enough to write “mixture of EU and non-EU oil,” obviously in small letters. So that no one really understands that they are using Tunisian oil, where they think they are buying a product that is typically Made in Italy.

The damage to the Italian system, as Coldiretti has rightly protested, is enormous. While we quadruple imports of Tunisian oil, Italian growers’ warehouses are full of unsold Made in Italy extra virgin oil product. Not only that. Competition does not exist: our Oil, of great quality and effectiveness for the health of consumers, has high production costs, incomparable with those of Tunisian farmers. Tunisian oil, in fact, thanks to poorly paid labor and the absence of a series of health guarantees and controls on both the product and the workers, who are paid off the books and without social security coverage, costs about 2 euros per liter. The Italian one 7 euros per liter. And so the game is lost at the start. Moreover, with this opening a new opening for counterfeiting, which has already exceeded 60 billion euros a year in the agri-food sector alone, costing Italy something like 300 thousand jobs.

Unfortunately, with a new EU regulation, the marketing of so-called “deodorized” oils, those obtained by admixture and adulteration of various kinds, is favored, to the detriment of the quality and genuineness of real extra virgin olive oil.Often the smell of the oil is “corrected” to hide the stench of rotten olives because too much time has passed from the time of harvesting to the time of processing or because they were harvested from the ground and not from the tree.

Olives should be harvested at their proper time of ripeness.

Standards and Regulations for Oil

The result of pressing olives is not always a qualitatively flawless oil: many factors combine to determine the unique and unrepeatable character of that oil pressed at that moment.

This is why the evaluation of an oil’s quality is carried out extensively on individual batches of product: a sample is taken from each batch, subjected to the strictest tasting tests and examinations, and only then can it be decided to which of the classes defined by EU regulations the product of that pressing belongs.

The classification of oils according to strict parameters was promoted by the European Community in order to safeguard the high commodity value of olive oil, preventing its admixture with oils of lesser commercial value, such as pomace and seed oils, thus seeking to guarantee the consumer from the dangers of fraud and adulteration.

Virgin is defined as any oil that has not undergone any other extractive process than the strictly mechanical one, without the use of solvents or other chemical manipulations, and that has not been mixed with oils of another nature. To deserve the designation of extra virgin it must prove to be completely free of defects on tasting and fully compliant with chemical-physical parameters of which one of the most important is the degree of free acidity (expressed as a weight percentage of oleic acid).

Thus, the quality recognized to extra virgin oils is the result of two different orders of investigation: on the one hand, the chemical – physical analysis, aimed at ascertaining the real composition of the fatty matter and its acidity; on the other hand, the organoleptic examination, panel – test, which judges the oil from the point of view of its visual, olfactory and taste characteristics and evaluates its merits and defects.

EEC REGULATION 1531/2001

The production and designation ofextra virgin olive oil is controlled and protected by European regulations in the ‘Art. 35 of EC Reg. 1513/2001 , which defines it as a product obtained from the first pressing of olives through mechanical processes, thus without the use of chemical processes or substances, under conditions that do not cause alterations in the oil and whose free acidity, expressed as oleic acid, is not more than 0.8 percent.

Every type of food product in order to be marketed follows certain rules: from foods to wines, all food and wine products must be subject to laws from time to time issued by the Italian state or the European Union; these sets of rules serve to dictate good practices in both cultivation and production and bottling. There is also legislation on extra virgin olive oil, and today we will look at it together.

In addition to the regulations on trade names, there is one that on the classification of different oils on an organoleptic basis, which obviously includes extra virgin: this is the Council Regulation EEC 1531/2001 of July 23, 2001, which came into force on November 1, 2003, which effectively regulates all designations of virgin, extra virgin and olive-pomace oils.

In 2016 the laws already in place were joined by those contained within new legislation, which specifically touched on thelabeling of extra virgin olive oil.

First, it is necessary to know that the label is one of the least static parts of extra virgin oil production: regulations in this regard are constantly changing, adding and deleting obligations and wording to be indicated on the bottle.

We can say that the olive oil label is divided into two parts: the one with mandatory wording that must be reported and the one with optional information. The mandatory information is rigidly regulated by both national and international regulations and ideally goes to help consumers understand what they are actually buying; the optional information, on the other hand, helps producers distinguish their products in the marketplace based on purity and excellence.

As mentioned just above, the information changes depending on the regulations; in fact, as of December 13, 2016, companies had to equip themselves for two changes to be reported on the label: one related to nutritional values (actually already contained in EU Regulation 1169/2011, but whose deadline ran from that very date), and the other to the minimum shelf life.

Differences in Italy/Foreign Production

When it comes to oil, there is no one region of origin that is better than the other. There are virtuous techniques of managing the olive grove, harvesting, processing and storage that make it possible to obtain a quality product. Good oils, in short, are those that are done well.In Italy we have excellent oils and a great choice of olive varieties, a biodiversity that allows us to have more particular tastes.

The differences between extra virgin olive oils produced in Italy and those in other countries all lie in the presence of a particular chemical heritage, consisting of a hundred molecules, possessed by Italian but not foreign products that contribute to the formation of its taste and organoleptic characteristics.It is, therefore, the territory that makes the difference, as shown by the concentration of oil production in specific areas of Italy: Puglia is the region from which most of the olives for oil production come (38 percent), followed by Calabria (22 percent), Sicily and Campania (9 percent) and Lazio (5 percent).

If on the level of olive oil production volumes Italy does not reach the top, it is, however, true that when talking about quality the discourse changes. No other country can boast the heritage of biodiversity, culture and certifications present in Italy.

We should also be able to communicate the much quality we market, the unique, nutritional, sensory, and cultural value of Extra Virgin Olive Oil and its connection to the territories of our Nation.

Read also: The best extra virgin olive oil in the world