Green or black?

The colour reveals ripeness, not the variety

We are very often asked what the difference between green and black olives is. Contrary to popular belief, the colour has nothing to do with the variety. In the natural ripening process, the olive changes colour several times: from green to violet to dark brown to black. Green olives are harvested before they are fully ripe and thus keep their colour. Fully ripe black olives are harvested much later.

Differences in taste

• Green olives: firm to the bite, strongly fruity, often with a pronounced bitter note.
• Black olives: softer, intensely savoury, more balanced due to the longer ripening time.

Beware of black olives from mass production

Traditionally, table olives are harvested by hand as soon as they are ripe – the same tree is picked several times. That is laborious. Industrial production avoids this effort: unripe, green olives are harvested mechanically in one pass and then treated with iron salts such as ferrous gluconate (E579) or ferrous lactate (E585). The flesh oxidises and darkens – a uniform degree of ripeness is merely faked. With such olives, the colour difference is purely cosmetic. A look at the ingredients list is enough: if it says E579 or E585, they are artificially blackened olives.

And what about the oil?

The same relationship applies to olive oil as to table olives: the earlier – that is, greener – the harvest, the grassier, more bitter and more polyphenol-rich the oil. A late harvest brings more yield, but a milder oil with less character.