This list comes from fifteen years of carrying oil home in suitcases, twice losing a bottle to a cracked corner and once explaining a suspicious stain to a customs officer. The six tips are in the order I use them myself, from choosing the shop to wrapping the tin for the flight, and each one saves either money or a ruined litre. Read them before you go shopping, not while you are standing in front of a wall of bottles.
Tip one: buy where the oil is made
A farm shop or a mill attached to an olive grove sells oil from trees you can see from the door, and the price is usually a third less than the deli in the old town. In Puglia I pay 9 euros a litre at the press and 15 for the same bottle in a shop that caters to visitors. Ask whether the oil is theirs or blended from several growers; both can be good, but only one has a name you can follow back.
Cooperative presses often have a roadside window where oil is sold straight from the tank in the weeks after harvest, and a container filled there costs about 5 euros a litre. Bring a clean bottle if you have one, though the sellers will lend you something to pour into and look pleased that you asked.
Tip two: read the harvest date
Most tins show a best-before date two years out, which tells you nothing about freshness. What matters is the harvest, usually printed as a month and year or as the crop season: oil from an autumn press is at its best for the first twelve months and still good for eighteen. A bottle with no date at all is the one I put back on the shelf.
- Harvest under six months old: grassy, sharp, ideal for finishing raw dishes.
- Twelve months: rounder, better for cooking and for frying potatoes.
- Two years or unknown: fine for the pan, not worth the suitcase space.
Tip three: taste before you buy
Any serious seller will pour a small sample, and how they react tells you as much as the oil does. Fresh oil should taste of grass and green tomato, then catch the back of your throat with a clean peppery cough; that catch is the polyphenols, and it is the sign of oil pressed recently rather than stored patiently.
- Pour a spoonful and warm the glass in your hand for thirty seconds.
- Smell it first: apple, artichoke and cut grass are good, and nuts mean it is old.
- Sip a little and let it sit, then swallow and wait for the pepper at the back.
- Spit or swallow, then compare with a second sample from the same shop.
Tip four: choose tin over glass
A one-litre tin weighs about the same as a small water bottle, fits flat at the bottom of a bag and takes a knock without splitting. Glass breaks, and a broken bottle ruins everything packed beside it, which is how I learned this rule. Avoid large plastic containers for anything you plan to keep, because plastic lets light and air through and the oil goes flat within months.
- Half-litre tin: easy to pack, and enough for two months of cooking at home.
- One-litre tin: the best price per litre, and the size most presses sell.
- Five-litre can: only if you are driving, or shipping it home in a crate.
Tip five: buy in the season the locals buy
New oil arrives between late October and January in Italy and Spain, and in Greece a little earlier. Shopkeepers call it by local names, it is cloudy and grassy, and it is priced to move rather than to impress. Outside that window the good oil from the last press is still on the shelf, so the trip is never wasted, but the best week to be in an olive town is the one after the mill restarts.
If your dates fall outside the press season, look for a producer who puts the variety of olive on the label. Single-variety oils are worth tasting side by side, and a shop that explains the difference without being asked is usually a shop worth buying from anyway.
Tip six: get it home without losing it
Tin only, wrapped in a jumper inside your checked bag and never in hand luggage, where the liquids rule would see a one-litre tin taken at security. Put it in a plastic bag, note the litre count on the outside, and carry the receipt in case anyone asks what you paid. If you are flying home within a week, buy the oil on the last day of the trip rather than the first, because a month in a hot car boot costs the oil more than the flight does. Of all six tips, the harvest date and the tin are the two that matter if you only remember those.