The quality of Extra Virgin Olive Oil

The Laws of the European Union and the International Olive Oil Council (IOOC) in addition to the parameters set to define the name of olive oils, identifies four other factors to determine the quality of olive oil:

• 1. Absence of defects
• There must be not artificial defects, but the defects can be due to a myriad of reasons concerning: the olives themselves (as little or too much mature, dirty, dried up, "cooked" from the freeze temperatures, etc.), the process (milling machines not clean or obsolete, high temperatures in milling process, approximate separation of olive oil from the vegetation water, etc..), the storage (dirty silos, racking not carried out, polluted environments). The definition of defects is carried out by three parameters:
   a) il tasso di acidità (la bassa acidità indica una qualità migliore;
    b) The value of alkyl esters (must be <75 mg.)
  And especially
   c) the evaluation of the Panel Test (test in which a panel of experts will judge the organoleptic characteristics of oil samples), which assesses the presence and consistency of almost all the defects found in the extra virgin olive oils.


• 2. Purity
• Means the absence of residues that contaminate the oil. We take away all the external elements who stay during the olive harvest, pressing and racking into containers. To determine the level of purity, is therefore the quality with which you are filtering the olive oil.


• 3. Authenticity
• Guarantee of "naturalness". It is the guarantee that the extra virgin olive oil is extracted from olives solely by mechanical action, without thermical or chemical process that may modify the natural characteristics of olive oils.


• 4. Typical
• Means the single lot of extra virgin olive oil comes from a recognized area of production for the quality of the olive groves. The typical parameter ensures that the oil has been produced from olives that have the characteristics of that specific area, characteristics recognized as a symptom of the quality of that territory. In this context we distinguish the PDO extra virgin olive oils that originate from various regions of Italy. Among 42 different Italian DOP extra virgin olive oils, the DOP extra virgin Terra di Bari VILLA VINCI is the biggest and the most characteristic areas of DOP extra virgin olive oil in Italy.istinguish PDO extra virgin olive oils originate from various regions of Italy and of which the DOP extra virgin Terra di Bari VILLA VINCI is the largest and the most characteristic areas of DOP extra virgin olive oil in Italy.