By the interns F. Tenaglia and A. Di Mauro, students of the "Evologo" course at the ITS Agroalimentare Foundation of Viterbo

The three main types of extra virgin olive oils offered by the market are: monovarietal, blend, and olivaggio oil.
Monovarietals are obtained from the milling of a single variety of olives. These are native varieties, meaning they have been established in a territory for centuries. This requires a selective harvest of that specific variety, possible only because the olive groves in those areas are monovarietal.
The monovarietal is therefore the expression of a single and specific variety that has adapted to a territory and a microclimate.
Oil blends, on the other hand, often represent one or more standards that each olive oil company identifies and tries to reproduce year after year by varying the percentages of even monovarietal oils present in the mixture, in order to offer their market a product similar to the tastes it seeks and requests over time.
Olivaggio oils, instead, represent a snapshot of the biodiversity of the territory where the olive grove is located. This biodiversity can give different aromas and flavors each year because the percentages of olives of each single variety naturally change in quantity and because each year the individual varieties react differently to the climate.
This type of EVO, having such a wide diversity, is often not appreciated by the market, which tends to be somewhat wary of them and instead finds greater security in monovarietal oils and oils obtained from blends, which express sensory characteristics that are consistent across different olive oil years.
They are, instead, the representation of olive growing that is extremely tied to the territory. What we do, and what many producers like us do, is to obtain the highest quality yield from this type of cultivation, which is complicated by the presence of different varieties in the olive grove and by their reaction to the climate of different years, so the start of the harvest must be carefully considered.
The production of quality EVO of this type requires much greater mental and economic effort from us olive growers compared to those who produce only monovarietals or blends.
Despite everything, we will continue to offer our consumers good, healthy products that represent Made in Italy, even if some segments of the market and industry experts do not show the right interest in this type of cultivation, which is, however, extremely representative of the national olive biodiversity, which includes over five hundred varieties of olive trees.