1. How judging works
Nearly every serious competition judges blind, in panels of trained tasters, using the IOC’s method or a close variant: the oil is warmed in a covered blue glass so colour cannot be seen, the taster scores fruitiness, bitterness and pungency and checks for defects, and the panel’s median decides. Most add a 100-point scale on top for ranking and medal thresholds. Entries are paid — typically a few hundred euros per oil — which means the field is self-selected: producers enter the oils they expect to win.
The differences are in what happens next. Some competitions give a medal to every oil over a threshold, so a vintage with many good entries produces many Golds. Some rank. Some score every entry and publish the score. One, WBOO, does not taste at all but totals other competitions’ results. Those four designs produce four different kinds of claim on a label.
2. Four kinds of result
| Kind | How it works | Examples | What a top result tells you |
|---|---|---|---|
| Medals by threshold | Every entry over a score gets Gold, Silver or Bronze; unlimited | NYIOOC, Athena, London IOOC, Olive Japan, Berlin | The oil was defect-free and well above average — alongside hundreds of others |
| Points table | Every entry scored out of 100 and listed in order | EVOOLEUM TOP100 | Where the oil stood against the whole field, with the number |
| Guide scores | Estates scored out of 100 in an annual book | Flos Olei | A rating of the producer, not a single bottle |
| Ranking | Places by category, or totals across other competitions | Mario Solinas (IOC), BIOL, WBOO | Rare: three places per class, or a season’s aggregate |
Four designs, four meanings. A Gold from the first kind and a first place from the fourth are not the same achievement.
3. What a Gold means
At a threshold competition a Gold means the panel scored the oil above a fixed line — 85 or 90 out of 100, depending on the event — and found no defect. It is a real mark of quality. It is not a ranking: NYIOOC hands out several hundred Golds a year, London and Athena their share, and an oil with Golds from three competitions has passed three bars rather than beaten three fields. The scarce results are the ones on top of the medal — Best in Class, Best of Country, Best Koroneiki in the World — which single out one oil from the Golds, and the ranked competitions where there is a first and only one.
A Gold says the oil cleared the bar. “Best in Class” says it was the best oil that did.
Two more things to weigh. The year: a 2017 Best in Class on a 2025 bottle is history. And which oil: producers enter one bottling and print the medal on the range, so check the competition’s own list for the exact name — which is why we link to it wherever we can.
4. Reading a medal on a label
Find the competition, the year and the tier, in that order. A named competition from the list on our rankings hub is worth more than an unfamiliar one; the current or previous harvest year is worth more than an older one; a special award or a ranked place is worth more than a medal. Then look for what the medal cannot tell you — harvest date, variety, a laboratory figure — because a competition judged a sample once and you are buying a bottle now.
5. What we republish
The rankings hub lists the eighteen competitions and guides we follow, with each one’s organiser, scale, season and how many of the library’s oils cite it. Where we have republished a full results table — the WBOO 2025/26 ranking so far — it is reproduced in the competition’s own order with a link to our page on every oil we cover. We never reorder a table, and a medal is never our score: the panel rating on an oil page is ours, the medals are theirs, and the page keeps them apart.