"Virgin" oil is obtained form strictly mechanical means, that is, from pressing the olives without additional chemical or thermal processing. "Extra virgin" oil also implies the oil is pure and of good quality, which means it has no additives and the acidity, bitterness, etc are within certain parameters.

The harvest is a different dimension of olive oil categories .

Thank you for the reply.

Is there a term for the harvest as a dimension? Or that's down to individual producers? Does it even translate, or requires olive region growing context? [A question that perhaps isn't easy if it merges commodity brands and independent producers.]

In general the harvest season depends on the region, and often the farmers wait as much as possible because ripen olives simply contain much more oil.

However, less ripen olives produce more green tinted and strong flavored oil so some fancy brands sell "early harvest" olive oil, taken a few months before the regular harvest, as premium varieties.

1. Essentially, the first time they press/smash a bunch of olives they can easily slurp/ladle out a bunch of the oil.

2. The remaining crushed olive junk still has oil in it, and they apparently have various industrial/chemical processes to extract that in 2nd/3rd passes.

#1 is virgin olive oil.

#2 is almost always labeled virgin olive oil, at least in the U.S., because it's not illegal to do that. This is in addition to bottles labeled as olive oil which are actually a mixture of olive and other oils, or even other oil(s) with coloring to look like olive oil.

The companies that actually bottle #1 tend to also do other best practices in bottling, labeling, and storing the oil which gets the oil certified by orgs like the COOC.

Uh oh, the COOC has screwed up their SSL certificate:

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It's to do with the pressing, not the harvest. AFAIK the first press of the olives is EVOO and after that they have other ways of extracting remaining oils (e.g. Pomace is a semi-chemical process on the remaining pulp)

That must be it - the first pressing of the olives for extra virgin, as I was sure there was a 'first' something.

Interesting this definition is slightly different from that in the article, a different epistemology: The first pressing would require trust (however arrived at) in a supply chain to declare, the second measuring the resulting product (positivist trust by measurement); the first encouraging diversity (artisanry?) perhaps over a less diverse (more verifiable?) final product with the second.

Thanks for your answer. And to the several other commenters.

TIL. I thought it meant that it had not been purified (more of the "olive" still present in the oil).

That is filtered vs. unfiltered, and has nothing to do with the "virgin" or "extra virgin" categories.