Olive oil is a seasonal crop, and the harvest date tells you how fresh it is. In our lineup, only Bertolli, California Olive Ranch, and Lucini listed a harvest date on their bottles. This is something usually seen only on premium olive oil where the growing, pressing, and processing of the oil is closely controlled by the manufacturer, like fine vintage wines.
Olive oil makers pick olives at the stage of ripeness that will yield the flavor they’re looking for. Greener, less-ripe olives make grassier, more pungent, and peppery oil, while black, fully ripe olives produce much milder, more buttery oil, with less peppery aftertaste. In the northern hemisphere—including Europe, North Africa, and the United States—olives start to ripen in September and the season finishes in February or March, so producers harvest and press olives during those months; in the southern hemisphere—including South America and Australia—olives ripen in the opposite months, so the harvest runs from March to July. The oil is stored in stainless-steel tanks and filtered to remove tiny olive particles. (If the particles are left in, the oil spoils faster. You can buy unfiltered oil, usually from small producers, but you need to use it up quickly.)
What does this mean for you? Oil can be stored in steel tanks for many months—or years— before it is bottled, and the “best by” date printed on the label is two years after that. By contrast, a harvest date tells you when the fruit was pressed, so it’s easier to gauge its freshness.
The freshest, newest crop of premium olive oil from the northern hemisphere is bottled and sent to stores by late spring or early summer (it takes six weeks to ship from Europe) and would have the prior year as the harvest date on the bottle. You’ll often find the older vintage oils (from the year before that) on sale around this time as retailers seek to clear shelves. If it’s a good oil and was stored well, it will taste fine—so you may get a real bargain.
That said, because most supermarket oils are made up of several oils harvested over months across different countries, a specific harvest date is harder to set. California Olive Ranch’s Destination Series bottles may have a harvest date, but the company lists two full years, such as 2017–2018, given that the oil now comes from a blend of oils from both hemispheres. In the past, the company indicated a single harvest year for its California-grown oil. Our co-winner from Bertolli listed a specific month and year on its bottle and printed a list of all possible countries of origin on the label while also indicating which sources were in that particular bottle. As a result, we knew that the oil we tasted had been harvested from four northern hemisphere countries six months earlier.
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