The chemistry behind 44 varieties

Manzanilla Cacereña

Northern Cáceres, Extremadura · the only variety the Gata-Hurdes DOP regulation permits

Manzanilla Cacereña is a dual-purpose Extremaduran variety, and the three bodies that publish figures for it do not agree on how much of it there is. The IOC World Catalogue of Olive Varieties records it as the main variety in the provinces of Cáceres, Badajoz, Salamanca, Ávila and Madrid, gives approximately 64,000 hectares in Spain, notes that it is also present in Portugal, and lists Albareña, Asperilla, Alvellanilla, Azeiteira, Cacereña, Carrasqueño, Costalera, de Agua, Hembra, Manzanil, Morillo, Negrillo, Negrinha, Perito, Redonda, Redondilla and Turiel among its synonyms — Azeiteira and Negrinha being Portuguese names. The Spanish Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food gives a smaller number: its ESYRCE 2024 report on olive plantations (Subdirección General de Análisis, Coordinación y Estadística; NIPO 003-25-104-7) puts commercial Manzanilla Cacereña at 36,256 hectares, divided into 14,116 ha of table-olive grove, 31 ha of dual-aptitude grove and 22,109 ha of mill grove. That survey covers commercial plantations only — 2,671,278 ha of a national olive area of 2,830,330 ha — and so excludes abandoned and non-commercial stands. The Consejo Regulador of the Gata-Hurdes DOP states on its own variety page that the cultivar occupies 48,000 hectares in the north of Cáceres alone.

Its standing in law rests on two instruments. The Orden of 18 April 2001 ratifying the Reglamento of the Denominación de Origen Gata-Hurdes, published in BOE no. 107 of 4 May 2001 at pages 16310–16317, reserves the designation in Article 5.1 to oils made exclusively from the Manzanilla Cacereña variety, with any further variety admissible only after experimentation, and lists 84 municipalities of Extremadura in Article 4.1. The same order sets acidity at up to 0.8 maximum, peroxide index below 18, K270 below 0.18 and moisture and impurities at no more than 0.1 per cent, with a fruity, aromatic, sweet flavour profile. Gata-Hurdes entered the EU register through Commission Regulation (EC) No 148/2007 of 15 February 2007 (OJ L 46, 16.2.2007, p. 14), under class 1.5, oils and fats, in the same act that registered Poniente de Granada, Mantequilla de Soria and Portugal's Azeite do Alentejo Interior. The variety is named a second time in the single document for the Aceite Villuercas Ibores Jara PDO, EU reference PDO-ES-02828, dated 3 February 2022 and published in the Official Journal C series of 29 June 2023, which requires a minimum of 75 per cent Cornicabra, Manzanilla Cacereña and/or Picual, allows up to 25 per cent Arbequina, Morisca and Verdial de Badajoz, covers 18 municipalities of Cáceres and reports a cultivated area of 12,416 hectares.

The IOC catalogue describes the tree as of weak vigour, spreading habit and medium canopy density, with early flowering and early entry into production, yields that are high and constant, and a low fruit retention force that facilitates mechanised harvesting. It classes the variety as of double aptitude, susceptible to verticillium and tolerant of fly and tuberculosis, and well adapted to poor soils and cold winters; the fruit is of high weight, black at maturity, with pulp that separates easily from the stone. The Gata-Hurdes Consejo Regulador adds that the trees reach around 4 metres, that the leaves run about 50 mm by 10 mm, that oil content is roughly 15 per cent on wet matter for an industrial yield of 10 to 12 per cent, that the variety shows low sensitivity to alternate bearing and strong rooting capacity alongside low vigour, and that it is dressed both green in the Campo Real style and black in the Californian style.

The fullest published chemistry for the variety comes from Montaño, Hernández, Garrido, Llerena and Espinosa, 'Fatty Acid and Phenolic Compound Concentrations in Eight Different Monovarietal Virgin Olive Oils from Extremadura and the Relationship with Oxidative Stability', International Journal of Molecular Sciences 17(11):1960 (2016), a study supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, the Extremadura agrifood technology centre CTAEX and Junta de Extremadura/FEDER funds, working from samples taken on three harvesting dates in at least three groves per cultivar and processed on an Abencor system. For Manzanilla Cacereña that team reported oleic acid at 78.40 per cent, palmitic at 12.27 per cent and linoleic at 4.84 per cent; total phenols at 468.8 ± 348.2 mg/kg and o-diphenols at 219.3 ± 176.3 mg/kg; and a Rancimat induction time of 51.8 ± 17.0 hours. The standard deviations are as large as the study prints them, and indicate the spread across sites and dates rather than a settled value. In the same table Picual reached 80.67 per cent oleic with 380.4 mg/kg total phenols and 66.6 hours of stability, Cornicabra 77.36 per cent with 632.6 mg/kg and 58.4 hours, and Arbequina 67.25 per cent with 200.2 mg/kg and 29.8 hours, so Manzanilla Cacereña sat second on oleic acid and mid-range on phenols within that set.

No monumental or dated tree of this variety turned up in the sources opened for this note, and neither the IOC catalogue nor the Gata-Hurdes Consejo Regulador offers a genetic study of the cultivar's spread. What the record does show is a variety whose table-olive and mill uses are close to evenly divided in the ministry's own survey, with 14,116 hectares registered as table grove against 22,109 hectares as mill grove in 2024.

From the public record: worldolivecatalogue.internationaloliveoil.org · mapa.gob.es · boe.es · eur-lex.europa.eu · pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov · dopgatahurdes.com

Galega

Ribatejo, Alentejo and the Beiras · named in five of Portugal's six olive-oil DOP specifications

Galega, entered in the IOC World Catalogue of Olive Varieties as 'Galega vulgar' under Portugal, is the country's traditional olive. The catalogue lists Galega, Galega miúda, Galega Vouginha, Molar, Molarinha, Negroa and Negrucha as synonyms, classes it as dual-purpose for oil and table, and describes a tree of medium to strong vigour with an upright form and dense canopy, medium-weight and moderately elongated fruit that is black at full maturity with a weakly asymmetric outline and acute apex, long leaves of medium width, and a moderately elongated stone with seven to ten grooves at the basal end. It records the variety's SSR fingerprint at UDO-43 170/172, DCA3 237/251, DCA9 190/192, DCA16 163/179 and GAPU-101 183/199. The catalogue entry carries no agronomic performance, disease or oil-chemistry data, so those have to be taken from elsewhere. On extent, Sales and colleagues record that 'Galega vulgar' accounted for 80 per cent of the olive trees in the country in 2007/08 and had fallen to roughly 60 per cent by the time of their study, displaced in new plantings by introduced cultivars.

In law the variety is written into five of the six Portuguese olive-oil designations of origin catalogued by the DGADR in its Produtos Tradicionais Portugueses register. Azeites do Norte Alentejano DOP (EU register EUGI00000013101) requires a minimum of 65 per cent Galega, with Azeiteira, Blanqueta, Redondil and Carrasquenha tolerated to a combined 5 per cent and Cobrançosa to 10 per cent, across concelhos of the Évora and Portalegre districts. Azeite do Alentejo Interior DOP (EUGI00000013541) sets Galega Vulgar at 60 per cent with Cordovil de Serpa and/or Cobrançosa at a maximum of 40 per cent and other varieties at up to 5 per cent, expressly excluding Picual and Maçanilha; that designation entered the EU register through Commission Regulation (EC) No 148/2007 of 15 February 2007 (OJ L 46, 16.2.2007, p. 14). Azeite de Moura DOP (EUGI00000013221) sets Cordovil at a minimum of 35 to 40 per cent, Verdeal at a maximum of 15 to 20 per cent and Galega as the remainder, over parishes of Moura, Serpa and Mourão. Azeites do Ribatejo DOP (EUGI00000013229) is built on Galega and Lentisca across 21 concelhos. Azeites da Beira Interior DOP, covering Azeite da Beira Alta and Azeite da Beira Baixa (EUGI00000013099), names Galega as the greater part alongside Verdeal, Cobrançosa and Cordovil. The sixth, Azeite de Trás-os-Montes DOP (EUGI00000013226), names Verdeal transmontana, Madural, Cobrançosa, Cordovil and others, and does not name Galega at all.

The origin question has been reopened by genetics. Sales, Šatović, Alves, Fevereiro, Nunes and Vaz Patto, 'Accessing Ancestral Origin and Diversity Evolution by Net Divergence of an Ongoing Domestication Mediterranean Olive Tree Variety', Frontiers in Plant Science (2021), a collaboration of the Instituto de Tecnologia Química e Biológica António Xavier at Universidade NOVA de Lisboa, the Centre Bio R&D Unit of Association BLC3, the University of Zagreb and InnovPlantProtect, prospected 629 trees and validated 595 — 356 classed as centennial and 273 as ancient — across ten Portuguese districts, genotyping them with 14 SSR markers of which 12 proved polymorphic. They resolved 95 distinguishable genets. One genet, C001, accounted for 254 of the 595 genotypes, or 42.69 per cent, with the second most frequent at 17.48 per cent; clonal diversity was highest in Santarém, Lisboa, Portalegre and Évora. The authors describe 'Galega vulgar' as a blend of West and Central Mediterranean germplasm carrying cultivated–wild admixture, report that cytoplasmic markers associate it with a lineage originating in the Eastern Mediterranean including Cyprus, and conclude for an ancestral monoclonal origin with subsequent phenotypic diversification through somatic mutation rather than repeated independent domestication. The paper makes no reference to Galicia; the popular etymology tying the name to that Spanish region is not addressed by it either way.

On oil composition the most specific opened figures come from Rodrigues, Peres, Vitorino, Peres, Cruz, Casal and Pereira, 'Azeites da cv. Galega Vulgar: influência da região de origem nas suas caraterísticas', presented at the 9º Simpósio Nacional de Olivicultura in 2021 and deposited in the Biblioteca Digital do Instituto Politécnico de Bragança. Working from seven groves at Alijó, Castelo Branco, Covilhã, Elvas, Mirandela, Penamacor and Vila Velha de Ródão, that team reported the highest monounsaturated fraction in the Covilhã oils at 76.9 per cent, tocopherols ranging from 243.4 mg/kg at Mirandela to 394.1 mg/kg at Alijó with gamma-tocopherol elevated, hydroxytyrosol and tyrosol derivatives falling from 325.2 and 112.8 mg/kg at Covilhã to 87.2 and 37.4 mg/kg at Mirandela, and an oxidative stability of 31.1 hours for the Covilhã samples. All samples met the extra virgin classification. The four-fold spread in phenolics between two Portuguese sites of one cultivar is the study's own headline, and no single national figure for Galega phenolics follows from it.

The standing risk is bacterial. Portugal's Direção-Geral de Alimentação e Veterinária lists Olea europaea among the hosts of Xylella fastidiosa and maintains demarcated zones across the Norte, Centro, Lisboa e Vale do Tejo, Alentejo and Algarve regions — including Carvalhal and Marvão in the Alentejo — under Portaria n.º 243/2020 of 14 October 2020 and Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) 2020/1201. The DGAV page consulted does not confirm any finding of the bacterium in Portuguese olive groves, and no source opened here classes Galega itself as susceptible or resistant.

From the public record: worldolivecatalogue.internationaloliveoil.org · frontiersin.org · pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov · tradicional.dgadr.gov.pt · bibliotecadigital.ipb.pt · eur-lex.europa.eu · dgav.pt

Picual

Jaén, Andalusia · 1,132,856 hectares in Spain, 42.4 per cent of the national olive area, per MAPA's 2024 survey

Picual is a Jaén variety that has become the largest single olive planting in Spain and one of the largest in the world. The IOC World Catalogue of Olive Varieties gives its provincial weight in Andalusia as 97 per cent of the olive area of Jaén, 40 per cent of Granada and 38 per cent of Córdoba, records more than 850,000 hectares in Andalusia and notes large diffusion in every producing country. It lists Andaluza, Blanca, Corriente, de Aceite, de Calidad, Fina, Grosal, Jabata, Lopereño, Marteño, Morcona, Nevadillo, Nevadillo Blanco, Nevado, Picúa, Redondilla, Salgar, Sevillano and Temprana among its synonyms. The Spanish Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food puts the national figure higher again: its ESYRCE 2024 report on olive plantations records 1,132,856 hectares of commercial Picual grove, of which 1,125,101 ha are mill grove, 7,570 ha dual-aptitude and 184 ha table, against a commercial national olive area of 2,671,278 ha and a total olive area of 2,830,330 ha. In the ministry's own chart of varieties Picual stands at 42.4 per cent of the national olive area, ahead of Hojiblanca at 13.6 per cent, Arbequina at 8.9 per cent and Cornicabra at 8.5 per cent. García, Brenes, Romero and colleagues, writing in European Food Research and Technology in 2002, state that Picual oils account for approximately 25 per cent of world olive oil production.

The designation that turns most closely on the variety is Sierra Mágina. It was entered in the EU register by Commission Regulation (EC) No 2107/1999 of 4 October 1999, supplementing the annex to Regulation (EC) No 2400/96, published at OJ L 258, 5.10.1999, pages 3–4, in the same act that registered Priego de Córdoba. The amendment application published at OJ C 332 of 30 December 2006, page 4, sets Picual as the principal variety at a minimum of 90 per cent alongside Manzanillo de Jaén; describes a zone of sixteen municipalities of Jaén — Albánchez de Úbeda, Bedmar-Garcíez, Bélmez de la Moraleda, Cabra del Santo Cristo, Cambil, Campillo de Arenas, Cárcheles, Huelma, Jimena, Jódar, Larva, Mancha Real, Pegalajar, Solera and Torres, with La Guardia de Jaén added by that amendment — carrying 64,009 hectares of olive grove, 84 per cent of the useful agricultural area; and fixes acidity at up to 0.5 maximum, peroxide index at a maximum of 18, K270 at a maximum of 0.20 and moisture and impurities at no more than 0.1 per cent, with oils described as very fruity and slightly bitter and a colour running from intense green to golden yellow according to harvest date and grove. That amendment was approved by Commission Regulation (EC) No 1157/2007 of 3 October 2007, OJ L 258, 4.10.2007, page 15. Picual is also named as a permitted principal variety, at a minimum of 75 per cent with Cornicabra and Manzanilla Cacereña, in the Aceite Villuercas Ibores Jara single document (PDO-ES-02828, OJ C series, 29 June 2023); it is listed among the accepted secondary varieties in the Aceite de Lucena specification; and the Priego de Córdoba Consejo Regulador names it as one of the three varieties of that designation, alongside Hojiblanca and Picuda.

The IOC catalogue records medium vigour, a spreading habit with dense canopy, early entry into production, high and constant productivity, a medium flowering period, self-fertility and early ripening, with a low fruit detachment force that facilitates mechanised harvesting and easy vegetative propagation by cuttings and seedling staking. It notes high fat yield and ease of cultivation, an average appreciation of oil quality, a high stability index implying high resistance to rancidity, and a very high oleic acid percentage. On resistance it lists tolerance of cold, salinity, excess soil humidity, tuberculosis and leprosy, and susceptibility to drought, limestone soils, leaf spot, verticillium and olive fly.

The published chemistry is unusually deep for a single cultivar. García, Brenes, Romero and co-authors, 'Study of phenolic compounds in virgin olive oils of the Picual variety', European Food Research and Technology 215:407–412 (2002), working in Seville and sampling different areas of Jaén province across the 1999/2000 and 2000/2001 crop seasons, report a total polyphenol content for the monovarietal oil ranging from 300 to 700 ppm, with the aglycon of oleuropein the predominant compound followed by other secoiridoid aglycons and the lignan pinoresinol present at about 40 ppm; they also record that two years in amber glass produced only a 30 per cent decline in phenolic compounds. More recently de Torres, Espínola, Moya, Cara Corpas, Vidal and Pérez-Huertas, 'Maximizing Antioxidant Potential in Picual Virgin Olive Oil', Foods 13(13):2093 (2024), from the University of Jaén, measured maxima around 771 mg/kg for rainfed fruit at maturity index 3–4 and around 761 mg/kg for irrigated fruit at maturity index 2.8, and found that raising malaxation temperature from 20 to 60 °C while cutting mixing time from 60 to 20 minutes moved phenol content upward. In the Extremaduran comparison of Montaño and colleagues (International Journal of Molecular Sciences 17(11):1960, 2016) Picual returned the highest oleic acid of the eight cultivars at 80.67 per cent with palmitic at 11.62 and linoleic at 3.08 per cent, total phenols of 380.4 mg/kg, o-diphenols of 243.4 mg/kg and the longest Rancimat induction time in that set at 66.6 hours.

The variety's best-known individual tree is the Olivo de Fuentebuena at Arroyo del Ojanco, Jaén. The municipality's own heritage page gives its height as 10 metres, its trunk circumference as over 4 metres from base to crown, two of its branches at 2.10 and 2.80 metres in perimeter and its canopy volume as 260 cubic metres, states that it has been declared a Monumento Natural by the Junta de Andalucía, and reports that around 1800 the tree yielded 850 kilograms of olives in a single season, a figure it links to a Guinness World Records entry. The same page sets out two local traditions for its planting — mendicant friars after the Reconquista, or a blessed Palm Sunday branch set in the ground the following day — and gives no dendrochronological or genetic date. It does not state the tree's variety.

From the public record: worldolivecatalogue.internationaloliveoil.org · mapa.gob.es · eur-lex.europa.eu · link.springer.com · pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov · arroyodelojanco.es · dopriegodecordoba.es

Hojiblanca

Lucena, Córdoba · Spain's largest dual-aptitude planting, 150,972 hectares of double-purpose grove in 2024

Hojiblanca takes its Spanish name from the pale underside of its leaf and its oldest recorded name, Casta de Lucena, from the Córdoba town where it originated; the IOC World Catalogue of Olive Varieties lists Casta de Lucena and Lucentino as its synonyms. That catalogue records it as Spain's third-largest cultivated variety at over 265,000 hectares, distributed 43 per cent in Córdoba, 30 per cent in Málaga, 17 per cent in Seville and 10 per cent in Granada. The Spanish Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food gives a materially larger number in its ESYRCE 2024 report on olive plantations: 362,232 hectares of commercial grove entered under 'Hojiblanca o Lucentino', or 13.6 per cent of the national olive area, second only to Picual. The composition of that figure is what marks the variety out. Of those 362,232 hectares, 210,133 are mill grove, 1,127 are table grove and 150,972 are registered as dual-aptitude — by a wide margin the largest double-purpose olive planting of any variety in Spain, and more than half of the 248,698 hectares of dual-aptitude commercial grove the survey records nationally.

In law the variety carries one designation on its own account. The Aceite de Lucena PDO requires extra virgin oil from Hojiblanca as the principal variety at more than 90 per cent, with Arbequina, Picual, Lechín, Tempranilla, Ocal, Campanil and Chorruo accepted as secondary varieties, across the municipalities of Aguilar de la Frontera, Benamejí, Encinas Reales, Iznájar, Lucena, Montilla, Moriles, Monturque and Rute together with the eastern part of Puente Genil on the right bank of the Genil. The current parameters come from an approved standard amendment, EU reference PDO-ES-0760-AM02 of 9 July 2025, communicated at C/2025/5414 and published in the Official Journal C series of 7 October 2025: acidity at a maximum of 0.5 per cent, peroxide index raised from 15 to a maximum of 19 meq O2/kg on the grounds that early oils can run higher, K270 raised to a maximum of 0.19, moisture at a maximum of 0.2 per cent, and organoleptic medians of at least 3 for fruitiness and at least 2 each for pungency and bitterness with a defect median of zero. Three parameters were struck out by the same amendment: polyphenols expressed as percentage of caffeic acid, because the prescribed method was held to be obsolete, performed by no laboratory, and recognised by no international body or EU legislation; waxes, as neither differential nor linked to origin; and colour, on the ground that green colour derives from chlorophyll rather than from variety or origin and that tasting glasses are opaque. A sentence asserting great stability and resistance to rancidity was removed as redundant. Hojiblanca is also one of the three varieties the Priego de Córdoba Consejo Regulador names for its designation, alongside Picual and Picuda.

The IOC catalogue describes a tree of medium vigour and upright habit, self-compatible with medium pollen quality, flowering medium to late and ripening late, with high but alternating productivity and average rooting capacity. The fruit is of high weight, moderately elongated, dark violet at full maturity, firm-fleshed and highly resistant to detachment, with pulp that is difficult to separate from the stone; the catalogue notes that late ripening complicates mechanical harvesting. It sets oil content low and oxidative stability low while rating oil quality high and the flavour prized, and it records the variety as well suited to Californian-style black table olives. On tolerances it lists drought resistance, tolerance of winter cold and resistance to chalky soils, against susceptibility to repilo, tuberculosis and verticillium and only moderate resistance to fly and leprosy.

Published monovarietal chemistry for Hojiblanca is thinner than for the other large Spanish cultivars. Borges, Serna, López, Lara, Nieto and Seiquer, 'Composition and Antioxidant Properties of Spanish Extra Virgin Olive Oil Regarding Cultivar, Harvest Year and Crop Stage', Antioxidants (2019), from the Estación Experimental del Zaidín of the CSIC in Granada, compared Hojiblanca with Arbequina across the 2014 and 2015 harvests at early and late crop stages using DPPH, ABTS and FRAP assays. They report that Hojiblanca oils showed higher phenol content than Arbequina at every harvest and crop stage, and that the Hojiblanca 2015 samples exceeded 200 mg of coenzyme Q10 per litre, which the authors describe as the highest values documented in the existing literature. That study does not publish comparative fatty acid profiles or individual tocopherol figures for either cultivar. The Aceite de Lucena specification offers the regulatory account of the variety's sensory signature rather than a laboratory one: a medium-to-high green fruitiness with an almond note attributed to the Hojiblanca variety, an aroma of freshly cut grass, and appreciable and compensated pungency and bitterness, which the specification attributes to the higher total polyphenol content of oils grown on the designation's calcareous, carbonate-rich soils at altitudes running from 171 metres at Puente Genil to 800 metres at Iznájar.

The documented history of the variety in its home district is set out by the Aceite de Lucena Consejo Regulador. It records more than forty Roman sites of the first and second centuries in the Lucena area, mostly the remains of agricultural estates that exported oil and wine; references from 714–715 CE to al-Yussana as a place of abundant water, olives and fruit trees; Lucena's tenth-century standing as a Jewish commercial centre trading agricultural produce including oil; the 1752 Catastro de Ensenada showing olive occupying between a quarter and a half of the territory that the designation now covers; and Pascual Madoz's Diccionario geográfico-estadístico-histórico de España of 1845–1850 recording oil in abundance and 106 oil mills. It dates the first mill at Rute to 1564, notes that the virgin oils of Puente Genil were given the OPTIMI OLEI EMPORIUM distinction by Spain's olive growers' association in 1935, dates the founding of the Cooperativa Agrícola de Rute to 1949, and states that by 1965 Hojiblanca made up 40 per cent of the varieties at Iznájar, coming from Lucena. No monumental or dated individual Hojiblanca tree was found in any source opened here.

From the public record: worldolivecatalogue.internationaloliveoil.org · mapa.gob.es · eur-lex.europa.eu · dolucena.es · dopriegodecordoba.es · pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

Cornicabra

Toledo and Ciudad Real, Castilla-La Mancha · the sole variety the Montes de Toledo PDO specification permits

Cornicabra is named for the horn-like curve of its fruit and is concentrated on the Montes de Toledo and their surrounding plains. The IOC World Catalogue of Olive Varieties classes it as Spain's second-largest cultivated variety, occupying more than 270,000 hectares in the provinces of Ciudad Real, Toledo, Madrid, Badajoz and Cáceres, and lists an unusually long synonymy — Cabrilla, Común, Cornal, Cornatillo, Corneja, Cornetilla, Cornezuelo, Cornicabra Basta, Cornicabra Negra, Corniche, Corniche Menudo, Cornita, Corriente, Corval, Cuernecillo, de Aceite, del Piquillo, del Terreno, Longar, Longuera, Ornal and Osnal. The Spanish Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food gives a lower figure and a different rank: its ESYRCE 2024 report on olive plantations records 225,799 hectares of commercial Cornicabra grove, or 8.5 per cent of the national olive area, placing it fourth behind Picual at 42.4 per cent, Hojiblanca at 13.6 per cent and Arbequina at 8.9 per cent. The survey shows how near-exclusively the variety is grown for oil: of those 225,799 hectares, 224,998 are mill grove, 705 dual-aptitude and 96 table. Castilla-La Mancha accounts for 16.3 per cent of the Spanish olive area in the same report.

The variety's principal standing in law is as a monovarietal designation. The specification for the Montes de Toledo PDO, EC file number ES-PDO-0105-0083-19.09.2007, published in the Official Journal C 236 of 1 October 2009 at page 25 under Council Regulation (EC) No 510/2006, defines the product as extra virgin olive oil obtained from the fruit of Olea europaea L. of the Cornicabra variety by mechanical or other physical means, and admits no other variety. It sets acidity at a maximum of 0.7 degrees, peroxide index at a maximum of 15 meq O2/kg, K270 at a maximum of 0.15 and moisture and impurities at a maximum of 0.1 per cent each; it describes the oil compositionally as high in oleic acid and low in linoleic acid with a high total polyphenol content conferring marked stability, and sensorially as dense in the mouth, fruity and aromatic with medium to intense bitterness and pungency, its colour running from golden yellow to intense green according to harvest date and location. The zone is described as 128 municipalities, 106 in Toledo and 22 in Ciudad Real, in a district of annual rainfall between 400 and 600 mm under a markedly continental temperature regime. The specification records the national step in the amendment as the Resolución of 15 June 2007 of the regional agriculture ministry, published in D.O.C.M. no. 142 of 6 July 2007; the European Commission's own register entry dates the designation's EU protection to 2000. Cornicabra is also named as one of three permitted principal varieties, at a combined minimum of 75 per cent with Manzanilla Cacereña and Picual, in the single document for the Aceite Villuercas Ibores Jara PDO, EU reference PDO-ES-02828, published in the Official Journal C series of 29 June 2023 over 18 municipalities of Cáceres and 12,416 hectares.

The IOC catalogue describes a tree of medium vigour with an upright habit and medium to dense canopy, late entry into production, high productivity and alternating yields. The fruit is of medium weight, very elongated and strongly asymmetric with an acute apex and truncate base, ripening late and holding to the tree with high resistance to detachment. The catalogue records high fat yield with excellent organoleptic characteristics and high stability, notes the pulp quality also suits table processing, and lists the variety as especially sensitive to tuberculosis, verticillium and repilo, and subject to fly attack. The late ripening and the strong fruit retention together are the traits that bear on harvest method.

For composition the fullest opened dataset is again Montaño, Hernández, Garrido, Llerena and Espinosa, International Journal of Molecular Sciences 17(11):1960 (2016), comparing eight Extremaduran monovarietals from three harvest dates in at least three groves each on an Abencor system, with support from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, CTAEX and Junta de Extremadura/FEDER. In that comparison Cornicabra returned what the authors call the highest mean values of total phenols of the eight cultivars at 632.6 mg/kg, with o-diphenols at 339.3 mg/kg, oleic acid at 77.36 per cent, palmitic at 12.12 per cent and linoleic at 5.32 per cent, and a Rancimat induction time of 58.4 hours — a phenol level well above the Picual samples in the same study at 380.4 mg/kg, though with a shorter induction time than Picual's 66.6 hours. Those samples were grown in Extremadura rather than in the variety's Castilla-La Mancha heartland, which the Montes de Toledo specification treats as the source of the oil's character.

No monumental or dated Cornicabra tree is documented in any institutional source opened here. The Montes de Toledo specification's own heritage account is a claim about selection rather than about individual trees: it attributes the variety's fit to the district to natural selection carried out by numerous generations of olive growers on unfertile soils under continuous plant stress, and the designation's Consejo Regulador extends that account back through Phoenician and Greek settlement. The consortium also describes its groves as mostly small family holdings with relatively low production compared with other districts.

From the public record: worldolivecatalogue.internationaloliveoil.org · mapa.gob.es · eur-lex.europa.eu · agriculture.ec.europa.eu · pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov · domontesdetoledo.com

Cobrançosa

Trás-os-Montes, northeast Portugal · named in four Portuguese olive-oil DOP specifications, from the northeast to the Alentejo

Cobrançosa is registered in the International Olive Council's World Catalogue of Olive Varieties as a Portuguese oil variety, with the synonyms Quebrançosa, Salgueira and Verdeal Cobrançosa. The catalogue's entry is a morphological one: weak to medium vigour, spreading growth habit, medium canopy density, medium fruit weight, black at full maturity, moderately elongated and strongly asymmetric, with a rounded apex bearing a strong nipple and a truncate base, long and very elongated recurved leaves, and a very elongated stone of high weight with between seven and ten grooves on the basal end. The same entry carries no figure for oil content, self-fertility, ripening date or disease response, so the agronomic record for this variety has to be assembled from the specifications and the trial literature rather than from the catalogue.

Its standing in Portuguese law runs across four designations. The Direção-Geral de Agricultura e Desenvolvimento Rural's Produtos Tradicionais Portugueses register names Cobrançosa in four protected designations: Azeite de Trás-os-Montes DOP, where the production rules list it alongside Verdeal Transmontana, Madural and Cordovil; Azeites da Beira Interior DOP, where it appears under the name Verdeal Cobrançosa together with Galega and Cordovil; Azeites do Norte Alentejano DOP, where it is capped at a maximum of 10 per cent against a minimum of 65 per cent Galega; and Azeite do Alentejo Interior DOP, where Cordovil de Serpa and/or Cobrançosa may together reach 40 per cent against a minimum of 60 per cent Galega Vulgar. Azeite de Trás-os-Montes and Azeite de Moura were both entered on the EU register by Commission Regulation (EC) No 1107/96 of 12 June 1996.

The amended Trás-os-Montes specification published in the Official Journal on 19 August 2024 under file number PDO-PT-0216-AM01 sets out the terms in which the variety is worked. The existing text requires that "o olivicultor deverá utilizar as seguintes variedades aconselhadas: Verdeal Transmontana, Madural, Cobrançosa e Cordovil", and the approved amendment adds "outras variedades tradicionais aprovadas pelo Agrupamento de produtores". The same document reproduces the introduction to the old caderno de especificações, which describes roughly 40 000 hectares of Transmontano olive grove belonging to 30 000 growers and producing about 8 million litres of oil, or about 200 litres per hectare. The amendment tightens extra virgin acidity from a maximum of 1.0 to 0.8 per cent, keeps K232 at a maximum of 2.0 and K270 at 0.20, sets peroxides at a maximum of 15 mg/kg, deletes the aliphatic alcohols and waxes parameters, and widens oleic acid from 72.0–82.0 to 68.0–83.0 per cent, a change the applicant attributes to climate change, principally rising mean temperature and drought, together with an earlier harvest adopted to reduce anthracnose inoculum. The file also records that Portugal never completed either the summary sheet or the Single Document for this designation.

The chemistry has been reported by named laboratories. Peres and co-authors, writing in Food Chemistry in 2016, measured virgin oils of Galega Vulgar and Cobrançosa across ripening stages and under rainfed and irrigated regimes, and reported lipophilic phenols above 300 mg/kg and hydrophilic phenols above 600 mg/kg at early ripening stages, with the dialdehydic form of elenolic acid linked to hydroxytyrosol as the major phenolic compound in both oils, free hydroxytyrosol and tyrosol very low, and total phenols falling between ripening index 2.5 and 3.5. Marx and co-authors, in Food Chemistry in 2021, followed industrially extracted Cobrançosa oils through malaxation at 22, 28 and 34 °C, found that higher temperatures lowered most detected phenolics including the bound hydroxytyrosol and tyrosol forms, and reported that every industrially extracted oil tested still supported the European health claim on the protection of blood lipids from oxidative stress; a companion paper in LWT recorded olive-paste extracts at 2 800–5 400 mg gallic acid equivalents per kilogram of paste. Rocha and co-authors, in Food Research International in 2026, compared Cobrançosa and Galega monovarietals from Alentejo, Beira Interior and Trás-os-Montes and described the Cobrançosa oils as showing an intense green sensory profile with high green fruitiness and tomato, apple and herbaceous notes, identifying 26 volatile compounds in the Cobrançosa samples. Ferro and co-authors, in Nutraceuticals in 2025, measured fruit rather than oil and placed Cobrançosa among the highest of seven cultivars, above 60 g gallic acid equivalents per kilogram of dry weight at the first sampling point.

Outside Portugal the variety has been carried into trials. A seven-cultivar super-high-density experiment planted in June 2008 at La Puebla de Montalbán, Toledo, and reported in Horticulturae in 2023, included Cobrançosa specifically for its resistance to cold; its oils showed the highest fruity intensity of the seven over the two seasons scored, oleic acid at 68.9 per cent and linoleic at 9.9 per cent, and the authors grouped it with Cornicabra and Koroneiki as the cultivars with the better-balanced presence of positive attributes. Álvarez and co-authors, in Frontiers in Plant Science in 2026, sampled Cobrancosa among five varieties grown in Galicia and placed its leaf micromorphology in a group with Hedreira and Mansa Gallega, characterised by thinner cuticle and blade and lower trichome density. On the pest side, Rodrigues and co-authors reported in Crop Protection in 2025 that female Philaenus spumarius, the main European vector of Xylella fastidiosa, were significantly attracted to Cobrançosa in autumn among five traditional Portuguese cultivars tested. The heritage record is thin: no dated or monumental tree of this variety was found in the sources opened, the centenarian grove at Suçães near Mirandela characterised by Rodrigues and co-authors in Foods in 2021 contains six other cultivars and not Cobrançosa, and the 2026 olive parentage atlas built at the World Olive Germplasm Bank of Córdoba does not resolve a parentage for it.

From the public record: worldolivecatalogue.internationaloliveoil.org · eur-lex.europa.eu · tradicional.dgadr.gov.pt · pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov · europepmc.org · res.mdpi.com

Verdeal

Trás-os-Montes and Alentejo, Portugal · one name covering at least three cultivars that the register and the germplasm collections keep apart

Verdeal is a name the Portuguese record attaches to at least three distinct entries. Verdeal Transmontana belongs to Trás-os-Montes in the northeast and is the first variety listed in the Azeite de Trás-os-Montes DOP production rules. Verdeal de Serpa, also given as Verdeal Alentejana, belongs to the Alentejo and is a capped minority component of Azeite de Moura DOP. Alongside both, a further minor Trás-os-Montes cultivar recorded simply as Verdeal is treated by the Centro de Investigação de Montanha at the Instituto Politécnico de Bragança and the LAQV/REQUIMTE laboratory at the University of Porto as separate from Verdeal Transmontana in their published characterisations. The Olive Reference Collection of Portugal at Elvas, whose accessions were described in Plants in 2023, holds 'Verdeal de Serpa' and 'Verdeal de Trás-os-Montes' as two of its seventeen studied genotypes, which is the clearest institutional statement that the two are not synonyms.

In law, Verdeal Transmontana stands inside Azeite de Trás-os-Montes DOP, registered by Commission Regulation (EC) No 1107/96 of 12 June 1996. The standard amendment published in the Official Journal on 19 August 2024 under file PDO-PT-0216-AM01 keeps the wording that the grower shall use the recommended varieties Verdeal Transmontana, Madural, Cobrançosa and Cordovil, and adds other traditional varieties approved by the producer group; no percentage is fixed for any of them. The designation covers Mirandela, Vila Flor, Alfândega da Fé, Macedo de Cavaleiros, Vila Nova de Foz Côa and Carrazeda de Ansiães with parishes of Valpaços, Murça, Moncorvo, Mogadouro, Vimioso and Bragança; the producer group is AOTAD and the control body is Kiwa Sativa. Verdeal in the south is treated differently: the Produtos Tradicionais Portugueses record for Azeite de Moura DOP, also registered by Regulation (EC) No 1107/96, states that "a variedade verdeal entra na composição do azeite com um máximo de 15 - 20%, a variedade cordovil com um mínimo de 35 - 40% e a variedade galega com a restante percentagem", across parishes of Moura, Serpa and the Granja parish of Mourão, under the Cooperativa Agrícola de Moura e Barrancos CRL and the same control body.

The fullest published chemistry for Verdeal Transmontana comes from a centenarian grove. Rodrigues, Casal and co-authors, in Foods in 2021, sampled a grove of centenarian trees at Suçães near Mirandela (N 41°29′26.628″, W 7°15′31.219″), marking twenty trees of six minor cultivars, seven of them Verdeal Transmontana and two of them Verdeal, and characterised the oils across five consecutive crop years from 2013 to 2017. Verdeal Transmontana fell in the highest oleic group with Redondal at mean values above 80 per cent, with monounsaturated fatty acids at 81.7 per cent, linoleic acid at 2.74 per cent, linolenic at 0.76 per cent, palmitoleic at 0.64 per cent, arachidic at 0.5 per cent and polyunsaturated fatty acids at 3.5 per cent. The authors concluded that Redondal and Verdeal Transmontana carry consistently high and homogeneous monounsaturated proportions across years.

The minor cultivar recorded as Verdeal behaves differently in the same grove and the same hands. Its oils averaged 75.8 per cent oleic acid, the highest palmitic acid of the six at 13.5 per cent, the only palmitoleic value above 1 per cent at 1.27 per cent, monounsaturated fatty acids at 77.4 per cent and the highest saturated fatty acids at 16.6 per cent. In the companion sensory and compositional study published by the same group in Food Research International in 2020, cv. Verdeal showed the lowest total phenols and the lowest vitamin E contents of the six minor cultivars examined, while Redondal showed the highest oxidative stability, total phenols and vitamin E. For Verdeal Transmontana specifically, Malheiro and co-authors traced the whole processing chain in Food Research International in 2018: volatiles rose to 130 mg/kg after centrifugation and clarification, and over twelve months of storage total volatiles fell by 94 per cent, phenolic compounds by about 50 per cent and oxidative stability by 57 per cent, with the fruity, green, bitter and pungent attributes falling alongside them even though the oil was still classified as extra virgin after a year.

The Alentejo Verdeal appears mainly in trials rather than in monographs. It was one of the varieties in the acrylamide study of potential table-olive varieties published in the Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture in 2023, where regulated deficit irrigation gave lower acrylamide levels than rainfed conditions for Cordovil de Elvas, Picual and Verdeal Alentejana, which is a documented record of its use as a conserve olive rather than only as a blend component. It also appears as a monovarietal oil among nine Portuguese and Spanish varieties in the NMR discrimination study published in Foods in 2021. Neither Verdeal has an entry in the IOC World Catalogue of Olive Varieties, whose Portuguese section holds Cobrançosa, Cordovil de Serpa and Galega Vulgar, and no dated or monumental tree of either Verdeal was found in any source opened for this note.

From the public record: eur-lex.europa.eu · tradicional.dgadr.gov.pt · europepmc.org

Picholine Marocaine

Morocco, nationwide · the country's dominant cultivar, whose share of the national orchard is put at figures ranging from about 80 to more than 98 per cent

Picholine Marocaine is the cultivar on which Moroccan olive growing rests, and the published estimates of how far that dominance runs do not agree. The IOC World Catalogue of Olive Varieties gives almost 858 400 hectares and 74 million trees, representing approximately 80 per cent of national orchards. Charafi and co-authors, writing in the African Journal of Biotechnology in 2007 from INRA Marrakech and the Faculté des Sciences et Techniques of Marrakech, state that more than 98 per cent of Moroccan olive orchards are planted to this cultivar, citing Boulouha and colleagues in 1992 and Bamouh in 1998. At regional resolution, Bajoub and Ajal reported in a 2016 InTech volume that 93.4 per cent of the Meknès olive orchard is planted with Picholine Marocaine, within a regional olive area of 43 000 hectares out of about 400 700 hectares of territory, served by 245 mills of which 102 were traditional maâsras, 91 semi-modern and 52 modern.

The origin of the variety is reported two different ways by two bodies. The IOC catalogue describes secondary diversification by consecutive crosses between an introduced domesticated genotype from the eastern Mediterranean and local wild olive trees of the western Mediterranean basin. Gómez-Gálvez and co-authors, publishing the first olive parentage atlas in BMC Plant Biology in 2026 on the basis of 840 cultivars genotyped with a panel of 96 EST-SNP markers routinely used at the World Olive Germplasm Bank of Córdoba, robustly infer 'Picholine Marocaine' as an offspring of the parental pair 'Gordal Sevillana' × 'Lechín de Granada', the same pair they identify behind Cornicabra, Manzanilla de Sevilla and Cordovil de Serpa. The two accounts are not reconciled in either source.

In law the cultivar sits outside any designation of its own. Morocco's framework is Law No. 25-06 on distinctive signs of origin and quality for foodstuffs and agricultural and fisheries products, published by the Ministry of Agriculture and Marine Fisheries in 2008. Bajoub and Ajal record two olive-oil geographical indications in existence in Morocco at the time of their 2016 chapter, the PGI Ouazzane and the PDO Tyout-Chiadma, and describe the multi-year work carried out toward a further protected designation for Meknès olive oil, including four crop seasons of quality and compositional data from 2010 to 2013 on 298 Picholine Marocaine samples drawn from twelve industrial mills. No geographical indication attached to the cultivar itself, as distinct from a territory, was found.

The agronomy is as the IOC catalogue states it: medium vigour, spreading habit, medium canopy density, medium flowering with partially self-compatible pollen, medium precocity improved on cooler ground, medium rooting capacity, high productivity, low resistance to shedding, susceptibility to the major insect pests and sensitivity to peacock spot caused by the fungus Spilocaea oleagina. Fruit weight is medium at 3 grams and black at maturity. Charafi and co-authors record that defoliation of Moroccan olive trees can reach 98 per cent in the most humid years, citing Tajnari in 1998, and describe the breeding response: three clones selected from Picholine Marocaine, named Menara, Haouzia and M26, all sensitive to Spilocaea oleagina, were crossed in 1991 at INRA with the resistant Picholine du Languedoc, and the resulting population was checked with 35 microsatellite loci, which showed 218 of 220 analysed descendants to be legitimate and no offspring arising from selfing of Picholine Marocaine. Bajoub and co-authors add Dahbia as a third clonal selection alongside Haouzia and Menara in their 2017 International Journal of Molecular Sciences paper. Haouzia and Menara now carry their own IOC catalogue entries: Haouzia at 24 per cent oil content, 12.4 per cent palmitic, 70.47 per cent oleic and 12.42 per cent linoleic acid, total polyphenols of 400 ppm, 60 kg per tree, reduced alternation and high resistance to Spilocaea oleagina; Menara at 46.7 kg per tree, 70 per cent rooting, total polyphenols of 400 ppm and aromas the catalogue describes as green almond, grass and artichoke.

On chemistry, the IOC catalogue puts oil yield at around 18 to 20 per cent, oleic acid between 70 and 80 per cent, phenols averaging 297 ppm, and records that the oil retains fluidity down to −12 °C. Bouymajane and co-authors, in Molecules in 2020, characterised five commercial monovarietal samples, one each from the provinces of Chefchaouen, Taounate, Errachidia, Beni Mellal and Taza, harvested between October and December 2018, and reported mean oleic acid at 76.1 per cent, palmitic at 8.7 per cent, linoleic at 8.1 per cent and stearic at 2.5 per cent, with secoiridoids at 130.0 mg/kg, phenolic alcohols at 108.1 mg/kg, phenolic acids at 34.7 mg/kg and flavonoids at 8.24 mg/kg, α-tocopherol at 57.9 mg/kg, γ-tocopherol at 4.5 mg/kg, α-tocotrienol at 2.5 mg/kg and β-tocopherol at 1.9 mg/kg, across an acidity range of 1.1 to 2.0 per cent. Bajoub and co-authors, working on 203 samples over the 2012/2013 and 2013/2014 seasons with liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry, identified and quantified 32 phenolic compounds together with quinic acid and found one characteristic peculiar to Picholine Marocaine oils among the Moroccan set, a low content of flavonoids, with the phenolic compositions of Menara and Haouzia oils broadly similar to each other and Dahbia distinctly different.

On quarantine risk, the European Food Safety Authority's systematic literature search up to 24 March 2017, published in the EFSA Journal, lists "Picholine marrocaine" among the more than sixty olive varieties and selections included in inoculation and sentinel trials on four experimental plantations established inside the infected area of southern Apulia against Xylella fastidiosa subsp. pauca ST53; the report states that results from those trials were not available at the time of publication. No dated or monumental individual tree of this cultivar was found in the sources opened.

From the public record: worldolivecatalogue.internationaloliveoil.org · academicjournals.org · intechopen.com · pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov · europepmc.org

Chemlali

Sfax and central-southern Tunisia · the variety the IOC records at 17 trees per hectare across the rainfed olive forest

Chemlali Sfax is recorded by the IOC World Catalogue of Olive Varieties as having originated in the Sfax region of central Tunisia and as being cultivated throughout the centre and the south. The catalogue puts it at 56 per cent of Tunisian olive areas and 69 per cent of the country's total olive trees on 2013 data, and describes it as the country's primary oil variety. The planting pattern it records is as distinctive as the share: traditionally 17 trees per hectare under rainfed conditions at a spacing of 24 metres by 24 metres. Mnasri Rahmani and co-authors, writing in Horticulturae in 2025 from the Olive Tree Institute of the University of Sfax with the University of Bari, state that Tunisia holds more than 200 autochthonous varieties but that ninety per cent of olive production is accounted for by two highly productive ones, Chetoui in the north and Chemlali in the centre and south.

The agronomic description in the catalogue is of a strong-vigour tree with upright growth and a dense canopy, high productivity with alternate bearing that is high under rainfed and medium under irrigated conditions, early maturity in November, self-fertility, a medium propagation rate by cuttings, tolerance of drought and moderate tolerance of salinity, and a high fat rate reaching 29 per cent on low fruit weight. On disease and pest response, the same entry records the variety as extremely susceptible to Verticillium dahliae, susceptible to the olive fly, highly susceptible to psyllid and moderately tolerant of the olive mite.

The chemistry the catalogue reports is a maximum of 59 per cent oleic acid, characteristically low, with a high level of palmitic acid, and a sensory profile given as intense fruity aroma with a slightly bitter and spicy taste. On the fruit rather than the oil, Bouaziz, Chamkha and Sayadi reported in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry in 2004 the first identification and quantification of the phenolic compounds of Chemlali olives through maturation, finding oleuropein the abundant compound and increasing during maturation, an indirect relationship between fruit oleuropein and hydroxytyrosol, a total phenolic content varying from 6 to 16 g/kg expressed as pyrogallol equivalents with its highest level at the last maturation period, and DPPH IC50 values falling from 3.2 to 1.5 µg/mL as antioxidant activity rose with ripening. Ghorbel and co-authors, publishing in ACS Omega in 2025 with a co-author from the Office National de l'Huile at Sfax and the Olive Research Institute in İzmir, examined eighteen virgin and eighteen extra virgin samples drawn largely from Chemlali orchards at Sfax, Graïba, Meknesi and Kairouen, harvested in the last week of October of the 2022/2023 season at maturity indices between 1.0 and 1.2, and reported that the virgin oils carried a richer pigment profile and a larger proportion of oleic acid while the extra virgin samples carried more palmitic acid. In a consumer study published in Food Science & Nutrition in 2022, Chemlali oil obtained by three-phase extraction was the second most preferred of seven varieties tested at a preference score of 55 per cent, behind Coratina, with the drivers of that preference given as an almond, fruity and green profile with low bitterness and pungency and a richness in hexanal.

The genetic record places Chemlali Sfax near the centre of Tunisian and North African germplasm. In the 2026 olive parentage atlas built at the World Olive Germplasm Bank of Córdoba from 840 cultivars and 96 EST-SNP markers, 'Chemlali Sfax' is one of the ten most connected nodes in the pedigree network, six Egyptian cultivars are inferred as descendants of the parental pair 'Chemlali Sfax' × 'Balady', and the cultivar's stigmatic group is deduced as G1. The Horticulturae 2025 study of Tunisian monumental olives sampled 28 ancient specimens from archaeological sites holding Punic and Roman oil presses across nine governorates including Sfax, selecting only trees with a trunk diameter of 3 to 8 metres and using growth pattern, structure and trunk diameter as approximations of age; with nine highly polymorphic microsatellites the authors recorded 67 alleles, a Shannon index of 1.68 and a probability of identity of 7.1 × 10⁻¹¹, and identified five pairs of identical instances at a pairwise relatedness of 0.50, listed as M25/Chemlali Tataouine, M1/Barouni, Chemlali Sfax/Zalmati, M28/Meski and M24/JEMRI_BC. In the discussion the ancient samples M25, M1, M28 and M24 are named as synonyms of the local cultivars Chemlali Tataouine, Barouni, Meski and JEMRI_BC respectively, which the authors read as evidence of the antiquity of those Tunisian varieties.

The institutional frame around the variety is the Office National de l'Huile, which runs the national competition for the best Tunisian extra virgin olive oil, in its ninth edition for 2026, and which reports that Tunisia took a record 15 of 33 awards at the 2024 Mario Solinas Quality Award of the International Olive Council.

From the public record: worldolivecatalogue.internationaloliveoil.org · europepmc.org · res.mdpi.com · onh.com.tn

Chetoui

Northern Tunisia, Béja and the Mannouba country · about 12 per cent of the national olive area but about 30 per cent of the trees

Chetoui is recorded by the IOC World Catalogue of Olive Varieties as having originated at Mannouba in the north of Tunisia and as being cultivated across nearly the whole of the north, on nearly 12 per cent of the total areas while accounting for 30 per cent of the total olive trees, which makes it the country's second main oil variety. The catalogue puts the northern orchards against the very wide rainfed spacings it records for the centre and south, where Chemlali Sfax is traditionally planted at 17 trees per hectare; it does not itself state how the two figures relate. Mnasri Rahmani and co-authors, in Horticulturae in 2025, frame the same fact from the production side, writing that ninety per cent of Tunisian olive production is accounted for by Chetoui in the north and Chemlali in the centre and south, with the remaining ten per cent spread across minor varieties in marginal areas.

The catalogue describes a tree of medium vigour with an upright to spreading habit, high alternate bearing and low vigour under both irrigated and rainfed conditions, medium maturity, self-compatibility and a good propagation rate by cuttings, and a fat rate between 24 and 28 per cent on medium fruit weight. On response to stress it records the variety as extremely susceptible to Verticillium dahliae, moderately susceptible to salinity and drought, and resistant to the olive mite. On climate it is explicit that the variety performs best in cold-winter areas and that degradation of Chetoui oil quality is observed under a Saharan climate of high temperature, high light intensity and low rainfall, which is how the catalogue accounts for the variety’s northern range.

The catalogue puts oleic acid between 63 and 70 per cent and describes the oil as having an intense fruity aroma of green almond with a bitter and spicy taste, for oil production only rather than table use. The most detailed laboratory picture comes from Manai-Djebali and co-authors, publishing in the Polish Journal of Food and Nutrition Sciences in 2023, who characterised Chétoui oils from thirteen mills in the Béja region of northern Tunisia. They reported total phenolic content from 906.53 to 1 298.60 mg of caffeic acid equivalents per kilogram, tocopherols from 282.88 to 416.79 mg/kg, saturated fatty acids from 14.55 to 16.58 per cent, monounsaturated from 66.23 to 72.04 per cent and polyunsaturated from 13.41 to 18.29 per cent, with chlorophyll from 2.03 to 7.85 mg/kg and carotenoids from 1.28 to 3.92 mg/kg. Oils from Testour II carried the highest phenolic content, while those from Amdoun and Dogga II were richest in chlorophyll and carotenoid pigments, and the polar fraction showed higher antioxidant capacity than the non-polar fraction on the DPPH assay. The study did not include a sensory panel.

On quarantine risk, the European Food Safety Authority's systematic literature search up to 24 March 2017 lists Chetoui among the more than sixty olive varieties and selections planted into inoculation and sentinel trials on four experimental plantations established inside the Xylella fastidiosa subsp. pauca ST53 infected area of southern Apulia, alongside Chemlal de Kabylie, Meski and Picholine marrocaine; the report states that the results of those trials were not available at the time it was written. Whether any susceptibility rating has since issued for the variety was not established from the sources opened here.

The heritage record is thin. The Horticulturae 2025 survey of Tunisian monumental olives sampled several ancient specimens at Testour in Béja governorate, inside the heart of Chetoui country, but none of the four ancient trees it resolved as synonyms of named local cultivars was matched to Chetoui. The institutional frame is the Office National de l'Huile, which runs the national competition for the best Tunisian extra virgin olive oil and whose account of the seventh edition, for the 2023/2024 season, records gold medals going to producers in the governorates of Manouba, Béja, Bizerte and Tunis, all of them within the northern range of this cultivar; the Office also reports that Tunisia took 15 of 33 awards at the 2024 Mario Solinas Quality Award of the International Olive Council.

From the public record: worldolivecatalogue.internationaloliveoil.org · journal.pan.olsztyn.pl · res.mdpi.com · europepmc.org · onh.com.tn

Chemlal (Algeria)

Kabylie, Algeria · the country's leading oil cultivar, put at 30 or 40 per cent of the national orchard depending on which body you read

The International Olive Council's World Catalogue of Olive Varieties files this cultivar under Algeria as "Chemlal de Kabilye", with the synonyms Achemlal, Achamli and Achamlal, and credits the characterisation to I. Trujillo, D. Barranco and P. Morello. The catalogue sheet is unusually bare: the fields for denominations, origin and diffusion, purpose and agronomical characterisation are blank, and what the record actually carries is morphology and a five-locus SSR fingerprint (172/179, 237/251, 170/174, 144/148, 189/199). Its share of the Algerian orchard is reported at two different figures by two peer-reviewed bodies. Haddad, Gristina, Mercati, Saadi, Aiter, Martorana, Sharaf and Carimi, publishing the molecular analysis of the official Algerian collection in Genes 11(3):303 (2020), describe "Chemlal, an important variety that covers 30% of the Algerian olive orchard". Douzane, Daas, Meribai, Guezil, Abdi and Tamendjari, writing from the National Institute of Agronomic Research of Algeria (INRAA), the University of Science and Technology Houari Boumediene and the University of Béjaïa in OCL 28:55 (2021), state that "Chemlal is the most widely grown cultivar in Algeria; it represents 40% of the Algerian olive grove"; Touati, Acila, Boujnah, Chehab, Ayadi and Debouba give the same 40 per cent in Food Science & Nutrition 10(6):1937–1949 (2022). Douzane and colleagues take their national figures from the Algerian Ministry of Agriculture series (M.A.D.R, 2010 and M.A.D.R.P, 2018, Agricultural Statistics Series B) and report that Algeria produced 80,000 tonnes in the 2017/2018 campaign, ninth in the world.

At district scale the picture is different again. Lachibi, Chehat and Belhouadjeb, in OCL 26:12 (2019), surveyed 63 olive holdings of three hectares or more in Jijel, north-east Algeria, and found Chemlal in second place among declared varieties at 25.71 per cent, behind Al Hamra; Chemlal is not indigenous to Jijel, and the authors take the 600-metre altitude line as the critical threshold for the variety's adaptation there. The national reference collection itself sits at the Institut Technique de l'Arboriculture Fruitière et de la Vigne (ITAFV) at Takarietz, some 30 km from Béjaïa, in a 0.95-hectare field established between 1947 and 1954; Haddad and colleagues genotyped 34 Algerian varieties there with 16 nuclear and six chloroplast microsatellites.

No protected designation names the variety. Candiago, Marsoner, Tscholl and Fraga, assembling a global database of olive oil geographical indications in Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems 9:1641032 (2025), record 177 olive oil geographical indications across twelve countries — Argentina, Chile, Spain, France, Greece, Croatia, Italy, Morocco, Portugal, Slovenia, Tunisia and Turkey — and list none in Algeria.

On agronomy the IOC record gives only tree and fruit descriptors: strong vigour, spreading growth habit, medium canopy density, long broad leaves with a straight longitudinal axis, medium fruit weight, black at full maturity, strongly asymmetric with an acute apex and truncate base, nipple absent or weak, and a stone of medium weight with seven to ten evenly distributed basal grooves and no mucron. Touati and colleagues (2022) describe the variety as having "high productivity and little alternating production season" and as "rustic and late, self-sterile, and always associated with other varieties that ensure its pollination as the varieties Sigoise or Azeradj". Work on vegetative propagation has gone through tissue culture rather than cuttings: Titouh, Moussa, Khelifi-Slaoui and Khelifi, of INRAA's Béjaïa centre and the High National School of Agronomy in Algiers, reported to the fifth Olivebioteq conference (Amman, 2014) that 7 to 20 per cent embryogenic calli were obtained from radicles of Chemlal zygotic embryos when induction used IBA or NAA with zeatin on olive medium.

The laboratory record is fuller, and divergent. Bendi Djelloul, Amrani, Rovellini and Chenoune, in Comunicata Scientiae 11:e3247 (2020), analysed West Algerian oils and returned the highest values of their sample set for Chemlal from Sidi Bel Abbès: total polyphenols 328.99 mg/kg, oleuropein derivatives 105.97 mg/kg, oleocanthal 102.43 mg/kg, ligstroside derivatives 83.49 mg/kg, lignans 35.93 mg/kg, luteolin 10.16 mg/kg, apigenin 5.44 mg/kg and α-tocopherol 228.12 mg/kg. Touati and colleagues (2022) sampled Chemlal across three bioclimatic zones and reported oleic acid at 67.51 per cent in Sétif (semi-arid), 62.62 per cent in Batna (arid) and 69.47 per cent in El Oued (Saharan), palmitic acid from 15.02 to 19.73 per cent, linoleic acid from 10.96 to 13.01 per cent, total polyphenols from 324.95 to 692.03 ppm and total tocopherols from 115.13 to 345.65 mg/kg, with Chemlal's oil yield holding steady across all three zones. Faci, Douzane, Hedjal, Daas, Fougère and Lesellier, in PLoS One 16(11):e0260182 (2021), followed Chemlal fruit from Bouira over four harvest dates in the 2018 season and recorded oleic acid 68.31–72.94 per cent, palmitic acid 12.50–17.19 per cent, linoleic acid 8.23–11.51 per cent, total phenols 150.11–199.02 mg CAE/kg and total secoiridoids 53.41–180.21 mg tyrosol equivalent/kg, with the earlier harvests giving the richer phenolic and pigment loads.

Sensory assessment of the variety has been published by Douzane and colleagues (2021), whose panel was ten selected and trained assessors under an IOC-certified panel leader. Chemlal samples were drawn from M'chedellah (Bouira), Tizi Ouzou, Boumia (Batna), Aïn Touila (Khenchela), Aïn Ouessara (Djelfa) and Béjaïa, and the paper records that they "showed a remarkable difference in their sensory characteristics; it varies from ripe fruity with spicy and slightly bitter traits to medium green fruity with more pronounced fruit intensity, stronger spicy and bitter attributes"; the same study puts Chemlal's oleic acid at 67 per cent and notes that all its samples exceeded 14 per cent palmitic acid. As heritage, the record offers genetics rather than trees: Haddad and colleagues found a distinct genetic core of thirteen cultivars from the mountainous Little Kabylie region in north-east Algeria, and confirmed Chemlal's own distinct profile without establishing any relationship to Italian cultivars.

From the public record: worldolivecatalogue.internationaloliveoil.org · pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov · ocl-journal.org · comunicatascientiae.com.br · narc.gov.jo · frontiersin.org

Souri

Levant, from Tyre to the Galilee · the genotype behind roughly 90 per cent of the region's surviving old olive trees, and the lowest-phenol oil in a Lebanese varietal trial

The IOC World Catalogue of Olive Varieties carries this variety twice under two country files, and the two records do not agree. The entry "Souri", filed under Israel, describes a variety "autochthonous to the eastern Mediterranean region", "cultivated traditionally under rain-fed conditions in Israel for hundreds of years", occupying "approximately two-thirds of the olive-planted area" and also found in Lebanon, Jordan and Syria. The entry "Soury or Sorani", filed under Lebanon and datasheeted by Milad El Riachy, gives the origin as Tyre city in South Lebanon and the diffusion as North and South Lebanon, and was prepared through the Italian-funded project "Social and economic support for the families of producers in the olive-growing marginal regions of Lebanon (L'Olio del Libano)", implemented by the Mediterranean Agronomic Institute of Bari with the Lebanese Ministry of Agriculture and the Lebanese Agricultural Research Institute (LARI), referencing Chehade and colleagues' 2012 characterisation of the main Lebanese olive germplasm.

In Lebanon the published share is the smaller one. El Riachy and co-authors, in Plants 12(14):2681 (2023), citing FAOSTAT, record that in 2020 olive trees in Lebanon occupied 74,188 ha with production of about 160,000 tonnes, distributed 41 per cent in the north, 36 per cent in the south, 13 per cent in the Bekaa and 10 per cent in Mount Lebanon, and state that traditional groves are planted mainly with 'Baladi', "representing around 70% of the olive production in the country, followed by the variety 'Soury' … representing around 20%". In Jordan, J. Albatsh of the Ministry of Agriculture reported to the fifth Olivebioteq conference (Amman, 2014) that the area planted with olive reached 125,986 hectares in 2013, 77 per cent of the fruit-tree area and 44 per cent of the cultivated area, 77.3 per cent of it rain-fed and 22.7 per cent under permanent irrigation, with about 87 per cent of trees at the production stage and some 80 per cent of the crop pressed for oil; the dominant cultivars are named as Nabali, Rassei and Souri, "the latter … mainly grown in Jerash and Ajloun". For Israel, the Knesset Research and Information Center paper "The olive sector in Israel" (written by Gilad Natan, approved by Sharon Sofer, 30 August 2009) records about 200,000 dunam of oil olives in 2009, some 80 per cent of it in the Arab sector and mostly unirrigated while almost all Jewish-sector groves are irrigated, against 180,000 dunam of oil olives and 22,000 dunam of table olives in the 2002 sector plan submitted to the Ministry of Agriculture, and annual output of 7,000–8,000 tonnes of oil, about half of Israeli consumption. In Syria the name is used differently: the GCSAR-authored sector review for CIHEAM lists "Souri" among the varieties of the Damascus area, separately from "Sorani" of Idleb.

Nothing protects the name in law. Candiago, Marsoner, Tscholl and Fraga (Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems 9:1641032, 2025) enumerate 177 olive oil geographical indications across twelve countries and list none in Lebanon, Israel, Jordan, Syria or Palestine. The one register the variety does appear in is the Slow Food Foundation's Ark of Taste, which lists the Souri olive under Jordan for the Al-Balqa area and the western highlands, describes an oil "characterised by an intense fruity aroma that leaves a hint of sourness in the throat when consumed", and records the displacement of hardy local varieties by introduced cultivars as the threat to the entry.

The two IOC records diverge on almost every agronomic figure. The Israel record gives relatively low tree vigour, low yield with a high rate of alternate bearing, mid-season flowering and green maturation, oil content "up to 25% percent in irrigated plots and 25-30% in rain-fed plots", propagation partly by grafting and partly from cuttings that root hardly, high sensitivity to Spilocaea oleagina and resistance to leopard moth larvae. The Lebanon record gives medium vigour, spreading habit and sparse canopy; production "even if mostly alternant, is high"; self-fertility described as slight and "very low, therefore it requires the presence of pollinators"; high tolerance to drought and low tolerance to peacock eye, olive fly, olive moth and verticillium; oil content "ranging from about 28% to 35% when expressed on fresh weight basis and 45% to 51% when expressed on dry weight basis", with harvest from mid-September to late October and October named as the best time for oil; a low pulp/pit ratio of 3.0–3.5; pulp consistency high throughout ripening, so that handling damage risk is very low provided storage does not exceed 24 to 48 hours; and a fruit detachment force to weight ratio around 1.6 N/g, suiting hand-held machines or trunk shakers. The Lebanon sheet also flags that Δ-7-stigmastenol sometimes exceeds the 0.5 per cent IOC trade-standard maximum and must be checked before export.

The chemistry is contested in the same way. The IOC Lebanon sheet reports oleic acid "around 67%" and "a relatively high polyphenol content (around 400 mg/kg oil)". El Riachy and colleagues (Plants 12:2681, 2023), trialling local and European varieties at Al Abdeh in North Lebanon (18 m) and Aabra in South Lebanon (180 m), returned for 'Soury' a total phenolic content of 204.42 ± 86.36 mg GAE/kg — the lowest of every local and European variety compared, against 586.64 mg/kg for Bianchera and 574.06 mg/kg for Coratina — with oleocanthal at 73.02 mg/kg and oleacein at 25.05 mg/kg, palmitic acid at 17.76 per cent (the highest in the trial), oleic acid at 66.65 per cent (the lowest), linoleic acid at 10.11 per cent, an industrial oil yield of 8.41 ± 1.73 per cent and a very late ripening index of 0.65 ± 0.37. LARI's own earlier survey of twelve Lebanese varieties, reported by El Riachy, Breidi, Abou-Sleymane and Chalak at Olivebioteq 2014 from fruit picked at the end of October 2013 and analysed by GC-FID, gave 'Soury' from Iaal an oleic acid of 64.9 per cent, palmitic 12.0, linoleic 14.4 and stearic 4.5 per cent with oil on humid matter of 27.9 per cent, and 'Soury' from Ain Baal an oleic acid of 67.5 per cent with oil on humid matter of 30.4 per cent, the highest of the twelve samples.

The strongest part of the record is genetic. Barazani, Dag and Dunseth, in Frontiers in Plant Science 14:1131557 (2023), report that of 27 local cultivars described in the first half of the twentieth century, current terminology retains five main names — Nabali Baladi, Nabali Muhassan, Mailsi, Souri and Souri Rumi — and that "the majority of living old olive trees (90%) in the southeast Mediterranean region belong to a single MLL (MLL1)", associated with Souri, citing Barazani and colleagues (2014); the same review states that "the selection of the Souri cultivar enabled the expansion of the olive cultivation zone in the southeast Mediterranean into more arid habitats", and notes that local growers regard 'Souri Rumi' as a remnant of olive trees from the Roman period. Adi, Dag, Ben-Dor, Gabay and Barazani, in Frontiers in Plant Science 16:1547174 (2025), working from Ben-Gurion University's French Associates Institute and the Agricultural Research Organization's Volcani Institute, write that "the widespread abundance of MLL1 as a fruit-bearing tree confirmed its identification as the common Souri cultivar", found MLL1's net photosynthetic capacity significantly higher than that of the traditional genotype MLL7 used as rootstock, and found the modern cultivar Barnea the most drought-sensitive of the groups tested. On the trees themselves, Camarero, Touchan, Valeriano, Bashour and Stephan, in Dendrochronologia 84:126181 (2024), working from the Instituto Pirenaico de Ecología, the University of Arizona's Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research, the American University of Beirut and the Lebanese University, radiocarbon-dated the oldest tree they sampled in the Noah olive grove at Bshaaleh in northern Lebanon at 1,161 ± 131 years, derived the regression age = 37.56 + 1.835 × diameter from diameter, ring counts and 14C dates across Mediterranean countries, and concluded that most old olive trees are centennial rather than millennial.

From the public record: worldolivecatalogue.internationaloliveoil.org · pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov · narc.gov.jo · fs.knesset.gov.il · om.ciheam.org · frontiersin.org · doi.org · fondazioneslowfood.com

Nabali

Palestine and Jordan · one name covering two genetically distinct forms, the 'improved' one yielding roughly a third less oil

The IOC World Catalogue of Olive Varieties lists this variety once, as "Nabali Baladi" under Jordan; its variety table for N holds only that entry and Nocellara del Belice, so the catalogue carries no Palestinian file and no separate record for the second form of the name. The Nabali Baladi datasheet is a fragment: the denominations and synonyms, origin and diffusion, purpose and agronomical characterisation sections are all empty, and the substance is morphological and molecular — medium vigour, upright growth habit, medium canopy density, high fruit weight, slightly to moderately elongated, dark violet at full maturity, weakly asymmetric with a rounded apex and truncate base, nipple absent or weak, stone of high weight with seven to ten evenly distributed basal grooves and a present mucron; SSR alleles UDO-43 210/216, DCA3 243/247, DCA9 170/192, DCA16 122/124, GAPU-101 189/197.

On distribution the institutional figures are national rather than varietal. J. Albatsh of Jordan's Ministry of Agriculture reported to the fifth Olivebioteq conference (Amman, 2014) that the area planted with olive trees reached 125,986 hectares in 2013, representing 77 per cent of the total area planted with fruit trees and 44 per cent of the actually cultivated area of Jordan; 77.3 per cent of the olive area was rain-fed and 22.7 per cent under permanent irrigation, around 87 per cent of trees were at the production stage, some 80 per cent of production went to oil, and the dominant cultivars were named as Nabali, Rassei and Souri. Barazani, Dag and Dunseth (Frontiers in Plant Science 14:1131557, 2023) record that the 27 local cultivars described in the first half of the twentieth century are divided in current terminology into five main cultivars — "Nabali Baladi, Nabali Muhassan, Mailsi, Souri, and Souri Rumi" — and that genetic testing places Nabali Muhassan in a group distinct from the MLL1/Souri cluster. The variety also appears outside its core range: LARI's twelve-variety survey of Lebanese oils recorded 'Nabali' at Kfarchakhna in North Lebanon. The ARTOLIO project, published through the ENI CBC Med programme in December 2022, describes Nabali Baladi as extended throughout Palestine, extremely resistant to drought, harvested in September for table olives and in November for oil, with an oil content of 23 per cent and fruit whose pulp is difficult to separate.

No designation protects the name. Candiago, Marsoner, Tscholl and Fraga (Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems 9:1641032, 2025) list 177 olive oil geographical indications across twelve countries and record none in Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria or Israel.

The sharpest documented dispute concerns the second form of the name. Said A. Assaf, in Acta Horticulturae 356:432–437 (1994), examined the soft-tissue cultivar marketed in the West Bank as "Improved Nabali" (Muhassan in Arabic) and stated that no record or scientific selection exists to justify calling it improved; he reported an oil yield at least 25 per cent below the traditional Souri, "watery soft fruits with … inferior oil quality", susceptibility to insect infestation of fruit, trunks and branches, problems in mechanical pressing through centrifuge clogging, and reduced suitability for pickling, and recommended renaming the cultivar, halting new plantings and grafting existing plants over to Souri. Field measurement at Jordan's National Center for Agricultural Research bears on the yield gap: R. Ahmad and S. Ayoub, reporting to Olivebioteq 2014 from work at Raba Research Station in Al-Karak Governorate on fifteen-year-old trees in the 2011 and 2012 seasons, tabulated Nabali Baladi at 2.8 g fruit weight and 27.8 per cent fruit oil content on a fresh weight basis against Nabali Mohassan at 3.9 g and 18.6 per cent.

The two forms are genetically separable. Obaid, Abu-Qaoud and Arafeh, in Biotechnology & Biotechnological Equipment 28(5):813–817 (2014), genotyped eight accessions — four Nabali Baladi, three Nabali Mohassan and one Surri — with five microsatellite primers (U9935, U9928, GAPu103, DCA9, DCA16) yielding 17 alleles of which 15 were polymorphic (88.2 per cent), and found the dendrogram separating the two Nabali groups into distinct clusters despite their similar Arabic names, with Surri showing only 32 per cent similarity to the Nabali Baladi samples. The name is not stable across collections, however: Al-Kilani, Taranto, D'Agostino, Montemurro, Belaj, Ayoub, Albdaiwi, Hasan and Al-Abdallat, in Frontiers in Plant Science 15:1437055 (2024), genotyped 48 accessions from the Olive Germplasm Bank of Jordan and 338 field-collected trees with KASP-converted SNP assays and found that "Kfari Baladi, Arabi Tafilah, Ketat, Kfari Romi, Nabali Baladi-2 and Sourani shared the same genotype" with the Lebanese cultivar 'Baladi' and its synonyms, alongside 73 previously unreported Jordanian genotypes and fourteen possible donor-collection or mislabelling errors in the bank.

Published chemistry is thin. Houshia, abuEid, Zaid, Shqair, Zaid, Nashariti, Noor and Al-Rimwai, in OCL 26:38 (2019), worked on Nabali Baladi extra virgin oil from Jenin Governorate (32.40° N, 35.28° E) harvested between October and December in 2014, 2015 and 2016, reported initial peroxide values of 5.57, 3.72 and 3.02 for the three years respectively, and found acidity, peroxide value and ΔK rising rapidly with sun and air exposure while carotenoid and chlorophyll concentrations fell. For the table-olive use, Ahmad, Mehyar and Othman, in Grasas y Aceites 72(1):e396 (2021), analysed Jordanian green Nabali Baladi olives fermented by the traditional spontaneous method — a product they state had never been studied before in Jordan — and reported 19.3 g oil per 100 g, 70 per cent oleic acid, 306 mg total polyphenols per 100 g and 3 g dietary fibre per 100 g. LARI's Lebanese survey (El Riachy, Breidi, Abou-Sleymane and Chalak, Olivebioteq 2014) gave 'Nabali' from Kfarchakhna a palmitic acid of 15.5 per cent, the highest of the twelve varieties sampled, with oleic acid 65.3 per cent, linoleic 11.6 per cent, stearic 2.7 per cent, oil on humid matter 23.7 per cent and a ripening index of 1.3 at the end of October. For deep antiquity the record is regional rather than varietal: Barazani, Dag and Dunseth date the earliest evidence for olive oil production in the southern Levant to thousands of crushed olive pits at the submerged Kfar Samir site at about 7,600–7,000 BP, large-scale cultivation from palynology at about 6,500 BP, and an Early Bronze Age surge in olive pollen.

From the public record: worldolivecatalogue.internationaloliveoil.org · narc.gov.jo · ishs.org · pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov · ocl-journal.org · grasasyaceites.revistas.csic.es · enicbcmed.eu · frontiersin.org

Sourani

Idleb and Aleppo, Syria · second-largest share of the Syrian olive area at 29.4 per cent, yet no separate entry in the IOC catalogue

The IOC World Catalogue of Olive Varieties has no entry under this name. Its variety table for S contains four records — Salonenque (France), Sigoise (Algeria), Souri (Israel) and "Soury or Sorani" (Lebanon) — so the catalogue treats Sorani as an alternative denomination of the Lebanese Soury, giving the origin as Tyre city in South Lebanon and the diffusion as North and South Lebanon, on a datasheet by Milad El Riachy prepared through the MAI-Bari, Lebanese Ministry of Agriculture and LARI project "L'Olio del Libano". In the catalogue the name stands as an alternative denomination of Souri, with no record of its own.

Syria's own sector record separates the two names and gives Sorani a large independent standing. A. Al Ibrahem and M. Abdine of the General Commission for Scientific Agricultural Research (GCSAR) at Idleb, with A. Dragotta, in "The olive oil sector in Syria" (Options Méditerranéennes Série A no. 73, CIHEAM, Bari, 2007, pp. 17–34, part of the Syrian national strategic plan for olive oil quality), report the Syrian olive area at 544,000 hectares and about 80 million trees, roughly 10 per cent of total cultivated area and 65 per cent of the fruit-tree area, citing Ministry of Agriculture 2005 figures, against 249,000 hectares and 26.6 million trees in 1980. About 72.20 per cent of olive farming is concentrated in the north-west (Idleb–Aleppo) and the coast (Lattakia–Tartous). The paper states that five varieties form about 89.3 per cent of the total cultivated area, and its Table 1 places Sorani second at 29.4 per cent of total area — behind zaity at 33.13 per cent and ahead of Doebli at 11.71 per cent, Khoderi at 10.30 per cent and Kaissy at 4.78 per cent — classified dual purpose, with an oil content of 22.7 to 25.9 per cent of fresh weight and a distribution given as Aleppo–Idleb–Hama–Daraa. In the same paper's list of varieties restricted to single regions, "Sorani" is assigned to Idleb while "Souri" is listed separately among the varieties of Damascus alongside Dan, Hemplasi and Jlot. Both attributions are credited to the project booklet "Characterization of main Syrian olive cultivars" (2006), which had characterised eleven varieties at that point out of an estimated 75, in a programme run with the International Olive Council.

The chemistry published for the Syrian Sorani comes from GCSAR's own laboratory at the Department of Olive Research in Idleb, which the same report describes as fully equipped and upgraded through the project and as having analysed more than 900 oil samples in its first year following IOC methodology. Its mid-harvest table gives Sorani a total polyphenol content of 559 mg/kg, total sterols of 1,363 mg/kg, oleic acid of 68 per cent, K270 of 0.20, K232 of 1.80 and ΔK of 0.004 — the highest polyphenol value among the five cultivars tabulated. On sensory character the report attributes to panel testing "a high intensity of fruity flavour with a strong aroma of green tomato (as for Sorani)". On pests, where the leopard moth (Zeuzera pyrina) causes severe damage to sensitive varieties such as zaity in the north and Dan in the south, the report states that "the Sorani variety seems to have a certain tolerance". It also notes that some Syrian varieties show Δ-7-stigmastenol slightly above the IOC standard limit, the same caveat the IOC's Lebanese Soury sheet records. Tubeileh, Turkelboom, Abdeen and Al-Ibrahem, in Acta Horticulturae 791:409–413 (2008), compared Sorani with Zeiti and Qaisi across three Syrian rainfall zones and found oil content at harvest slightly lower in the driest zone for Sorani and Zeiti but unaffected for Qaisi.

Where the name travels, it detaches from Souri altogether. Al-Kilani, Taranto, D'Agostino, Montemurro, Belaj, Ayoub, Albdaiwi, Hasan and Al-Abdallat, in Frontiers in Plant Science 15:1437055 (2024), genotyped 48 accessions from the Olive Germplasm Bank of Jordan with KASP-converted SNP assays and report that "several accessions from JGBOC (Sourani, Kfari Baladi, Arabi Tafileh, Ketat, and Nabali Baladi-2) also shared the same SNP genotypes with Kfari Baladi", and that these accessions "shared the same genotype with the Lebanon cultivar 'Baladi' and its synonyms". On that evidence the Jordanian gene bank's 'Sourani' accession carries the 'Baladi' genotype. No protected designation exists to fix the name in any of these countries: Candiago, Marsoner, Tscholl and Fraga (Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems 9:1641032, 2025) record 177 olive oil geographical indications across twelve countries and none in Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine or Israel.

From the public record: worldolivecatalogue.internationaloliveoil.org · om.ciheam.org · ishs.org · pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov · frontiersin.org

Barnea

Israel's irrigated intensive orchards · about 25 per cent of them, totally self-incompatible, and grown only on its own roots

The IOC World Catalogue of Olive Varieties files Barnea under Israel and describes it as "the most dominant cultivar in Israeli intensive olive orchards (25%)", with "some diffusion in some new producing countries like Australia, New Zealand and Argentina". Its purpose is listed as oil alone, and the entry notes that "the trees are well suited to mechanical harvesting using trunk shakers". The catalogue page carries no breeding history and no origin statement. The one instrument found that places the cultivar institutionally is a United States plant patent held by the breeding programme itself: the application for the olive tree named 'ASKAL' (US 2011/0107475 P1, filed 30 October 2009, published 5 May 2011, granted as PP22293 on 6 December 2011), whose inventors are Shimon Lavee, Benjamin Avidan and Yair Manni and whose assignee is the Agricultural Research Organization of Israel, Ministry of Agriculture. That document records a cross made in 1990 at Bet Dagan, Israel, discovered from the progeny in 1993 and selected in 1994, and states: "The female or seed parent is the Olea europaea 'MANZANILLO' (unpatented), and the male or pollen parent is the Olea europaea variety 'BARNEA' (unpatented)." Its comparison table gives Barnea a maximum tree height of about 4.5 metres, a spreading growth habit, a greater pruning requirement than Askal, later fruit maturation and an oil content 2 to 3 per cent lower.

The sector into which Barnea was planted is documented by the Knesset Research and Information Center paper "The olive sector in Israel" (written by Gilad Natan, approved by Sharon Sofer, 30 August 2009). The 2002 development plan submitted by the Olive Board to the Ministry of Agriculture recorded 180,000 dunam of oil-olive groves, of which 170,000 dunam were rain-fed and 10,000 dunam irrigated, an average output of 6,000 tonnes of olive oil a year against Israeli consumption of 14,500 tonnes, and a separate 22,000 dunam of table-olive groves, mostly in the Jewish sector, all of them irrigated and insured. By 2009 the paper records about 200,000 dunam of oil olives, some 80 per cent of it in the Arab sector where most groves remain unirrigated while almost all Jewish-sector groves are irrigated, and annual production of 7,000 to 8,000 tonnes of oil, about half of national consumption. Of the 20,000 dunam planted since 2002, almost all was in the Jewish sector, mainly in the Beit She'an and Jezreel valleys, the Judean foothills and the western and northern Negev. The IOC states its 25 per cent share for intensive orchards, which is the irrigated fraction the 2002 plan and the 2009 paper describe.

No geographical indication attaches to the variety or to Israeli olive oil at all. Candiago, Marsoner, Tscholl and Fraga (Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems 9:1641032, 2025) enumerate 177 olive oil geographical indications across twelve countries and list none in Israel. The only registered protection found in the variety's orbit covers the derived cultivar Askal, and the patent records Barnea itself as unpatented.

The published agronomy is consistent across sources. The IOC entry gives strong vigour, "a very high yield with medium rate of alternate bearing", relatively early flowering and green maturation with full black maturation mid-season, an oil content in mature fruit of "about 18 percent (an average of 2 tons/ha)", propagation "from cuttings that root easily" with the variety "only grown on its own roots", high susceptibility to leopard moth larvae, and sensitivity to summer water stress. Shemer, Biton, Many, Avidan, Ben-Ari and Lavee, in Acta Horticulturae 1057:191–197 (2014), established that Barnea is "totally self-incompatible"; in artificial cross-pollination Picual, Coratina and Askal produced fruit set rates similar to open pollination while Arbequina was significantly lower, and SSR-based molecular paternity analysis identified Picual as the most frequent pollinator of Barnea trees in commercial orchards even when located further away, leading the authors to recommend planting Picual upwind. Adi, Dag, Ben-Dor, Gabay and Barazani, in Frontiers in Plant Science 16:1547174 (2025), tested Barnea against traditional Levantine genotypes and wild olive and found it the most sensitive to water stress: under severe drought at 10 per cent of actual evapotranspiration it showed reductions of about 1.3-fold in relative water content and about 2.0-fold in stem water potential, described as "a strong response of the Barnea cultivar to reduced ETa conditions".

The fullest chemistry for the variety comes from a six-year fertilisation experiment. Zipori, Yermiyahu, Dag, Erel, Ben-Gal, Quan and Kerem, in the Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture 103(1):48–56 (2022, issue dated 15 January 2023), working for the Agricultural Research Organization's Volcani Institute at Gilat with Sichuan Agricultural University and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, ran treatments from 2011 to 2016 in a commercial intensively cultivated Barnea orchard on Israel's southern coastal plain near Kibbutz Negba. Total polyphenols fell from 274 mg per kg of oil at the lowest nitrogen rate to about 163 mg per kg at 300 kg N per hectare; oleic acid declined from about 64 per cent to about 62 per cent; palmitic acid stayed at roughly 14.5 to 14.9 per cent and was not significantly affected by nitrogen; linoleic acid rose with nitrogen; free acidity ranged from 0.68 per cent, within the extra virgin grade, to 1.14 per cent, in the virgin grade; and peroxide values remained below 20 mmol O2 per kg across all treatments. The IOC's own entry records the trade judgement that "the quality of Barnea olive oil is accepted as being somewhat lower than the strong Souri oil and other more delicate European olive oils". A 2024 study in Molecules of 230 virgin olive oil samples from California and Israel used Barnea, Souri and Arbequina fruit from Geshur Olive Farm in northern Israel, with sensory evaluation by Israel's IOC-recognised Southern Panel and the AOCS-recognised Applied Sensory panel in Fairfield, California, both applying the IOC method COI/T.20/Doc. No 15/Rev; Barnea samples in that work were deliberately exposed to freezing temperatures to generate frostbitten defects for the prediction model.

No heritage claim attaches to Barnea: every opened source treats it as a twentieth-century selection propagated vegetatively for irrigated, mechanically harvested orchards, and the Agricultural Research Organization's own patent filing treats it as an existing named variety rather than an inherited landrace.

From the public record: worldolivecatalogue.internationaloliveoil.org · image-ppubs.uspto.gov · ishs.org · pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov · frontiersin.org · fs.knesset.gov.il