The Best Extra-Virgin Olive Oil

Faced with supermarket shelves teeming with choices, how do you decide which is the best extra-virgin olive oil to buy? Don’t give up and grab the cheapest bottle. We’ll help you do better than that without breaking the bank.

Great extra-virgin olive oil tastes fresh, fruity, and lively, whether its flavor is mild and buttery or grassy and peppery. When we recently tasted premium extra-virgin olive oils, we couldn’t rank them from best to worst—they were all excellent and as unique as fingerprints. Instead we provided descriptions of their flavors so you could pick the one that most appeals to you. By contrast, our experience with supermarket offerings has been a mixed bag. Often, these products are made of a blend of bulk-purchased commodity oils, so their flavors are not particularly fresh or distinctive. In other words, when low price is the goal, flavor takes a back seat. In our previous tasting of supermarket olive oils, we did find one that tasted fresher and fruitier than the others, but recently its manufacturer, California Olive Ranch, changed the way it sources and produces its oil (more on that later), so we went back to the drawing board.

We bought 11 of the top-selling extra-virgin olive oils that are nationally available in supermarkets, including four labeled “robust”—these are recent introductions from some olive oil producers that are purportedly heartier in flavor than their supermarket extra-virgin options. We sampled all 11 oils in random order in three randomized tastings: plain, in a simple vinaigrette on lettuce, and drizzled over warm white beans. We also sent a set of the oils in unmarked, randomly numbered bottles to a group of independent expert tasters trained in olive oil analysis to get their impressions, but we did not take their comments into account when determining our rankings. 

Experts Gave Low Marks to the Supermarket Oils

Olive oil quality is judged in two ways: lab testing and expert tasting. Even if an oil passes lab tests for quality standards that were set by the International Olive Council, expert tasters must detect no flavor defects and some fruitiness for it to be classified as extra-virgin grade. The tasters are trained to recognize typical flavor flaws that indicate problems. These problems could include the olives not being in peak condition when they were picked and starting to ferment before they were pressed or the oil itself turning rancid. The tasters also note each oil’s “olive-fruitiness,” bitterness, and pungency; these are positive flavor characteristics that are present to varying degrees in fresh olive oil. 

In general, the expert olive oil tasters were not... read more