Basso Olive Oil: Which Basso, and What Is Actually in the Bottle
Basso olive oil turns up in a lot of places at once — a litre bottle in an Italian deli, a five-litre tin in a restaurant kitchen, a slim sculpted bottle on a gift shelf. The first useful thing to know is that these are not the same proposition, and working out which one you are holding matters more than anything printed on the front. All of them come from a single company in Campania, which runs two quite different brands at opposite ends of the market. This article maps the range line by line, checks the protected-origin names on the premium bottles against the EU register, and sets out plainly what the company publishes and what it does not.
For our own oil, see our cold-pressed organic Marrakech olive oil.
The Short Answer
- Basso olive oil is made by Basso Fedele & Figli S.r.l. of San Michele di Serino, in the province of Avellino, Campania — the inland district Italians call Irpinia. The company dates its story to 1904.
- There are two brands, not two companies. The everyday range is sold as Olio Basso; the protected-origin selection is sold as Sabino Basso. Both sites carry the same VAT number, IT00657990644.
- Basso declares the main cultivars and the country or countries of origin on every olive oil line it publishes — which is more disclosure than most of this category offers.
- The range is not all extra virgin. It runs from single-country Italian extra virgin down through EU blends to a refined olive oil, and on into seed oils and pomace.
- The premium Sabino Basso bottles carry real registered designations, but the names on them are not always the names on the register — the Calabrian olive oil PGI is registered as “Olio di Calabria”, while “Calabria” on its own is a wine PGI.
- Basso publishes no free acidity, no peroxide value, no polyphenol figure and no harvest date anywhere on either site. Neither, at the time of writing, do we — and we say so plainly below.
Who Makes Basso Olive Oil?
Basso olive oil is made by Basso Fedele & Figli S.r.l., a family company based at Via Nocelleto 46 in the industrial zone of San Michele di Serino, 83020, in the province of Avellino. The company dates its story to 1904 in Irpinia. It sells everyday oils under the Olio Basso name and a protected-origin selection under the name Sabino Basso.
That second name is a person as well as a brand. Basso’s own account is that Sabino Basso took over the family business in the 1980s and took it abroad, that a new mill was built at San Michele di Serino, and that the fifth generation — Fabrizio and Federico Basso — joined shortly after the company’s 110th year. The scale claims are the company’s own words rather than anything we can check independently.
What is checkable is that the two brands are one legal entity. The premium site at sabinobasso.it and the everyday site at oliobasso.com both print the same company name and the same Italian VAT number, IT00657990644. If you have seen the two ranges side by side and assumed a small estate and a large bottler, they are the same business wearing two hats.
The Olio Basso Range, Line by Line
The everyday range is where most people meet the name, and it is broader than a single grade. Basso publishes a short technical note for each line — product type, main cultivars, origin, and how it was extracted — which makes the range unusually easy to read for a bottler of this size.
| Line | Grade as declared | Main cultivars declared | Origin declared | Extraction as stated |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| The Extra Virgin 100% Italian | Extra virgin olive oil | Coratina, Carolea, Ogliarola | Calabria and Apulia | Mechanical, cold-extracted below 27°C |
| Classic (“Basso’s Blend”) | Extra virgin olive oil | Arbequina, Hojiblanca, Ogliarola, Coratina, Koroneiki | Spain, Italy, Greece | Mechanical, cold-extracted below 27°C |
| Fedele (unfiltered) | Unfiltered extra virgin olive oil | Arbequina, Coratina, Koroneiki | Spain, Italy, Greece | Pressed within four hours, cold extraction below 27°C, bottled as it left the mill |
| Italian Organic | Organic extra virgin olive oil | Coratina, Ogliarola | Apulia | Milled within four hours, cold extraction below 27°C |
| Classic Organic | Organic extra virgin olive oil | Hojiblanca, Coratina, Koroneiki | Spain, Italy, Greece | Milled within four hours, cold extraction below 27°C |
| Olive Oil | Refined olive oil blended with virgin olive oil | Multivarietal | Spain and Italy | Refined — deacidified, deodorised and bleached — then blended with EU extra virgin |
Two things stand out. The first is that the cultivar and origin declarations are genuine and specific: naming Coratina, Carolea and Ogliarola from Calabria and Apulia is a good deal more informative than the “produce of more than one country” that fills most of the aisle. The second is that Basso is unusually candid about its bottom line. The page for the plain olive oil grade describes the refining route in its own words — deacidification to lower acidity, deodorisation to strip volatile compounds responsible for unpleasant odours, bleaching to remove brown compounds from oxidation — before the result is blended back with extra virgin. Most brands selling a refined oil would rather you did not read that sentence. Basso prints it.
The range then continues past olive oil altogether, into olive pomace oil and a shelf of seed oils — sunflower, maize, peanut, rice, grapeseed, avocado — plus flavoured condiments. If you are buying on the strength of the name alone, that is worth knowing before you reach for the nearest bottle.
Sabino Basso and the Protected-Origin Names
The Sabino Basso selection is the other half of the business: a short collection of 500ml bottles, several of them carrying protected designations, in a bottle shape the company describes as award-winning in New York and Berlin. Those are its own words about its own design, and we have not tried to verify them. The designations, however, can be checked, and we did — against eAmbrosia, the European Commission’s public register of geographical indications, pulled in full and filtered this run.
| Bottle as labelled | Cultivar declared | Registered olive oil name | Type | Register file number | Same word also a wine GI? |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| DOP Penisola Sorrentina | Minucciola | Penisola Sorrentina | PDO | PDO-IT-1546 | Yes — Penisola Sorrentina, PDO-IT-A0280, wine |
| DOP Cilento | Frantoio, Leccino, Ogliarola | Cilento | PDO | PDO-IT-1547 | Yes — Cilento, PDO-IT-A0243, wine |
| DOP Terra di Bari | Coratina | Terra di Bari | PDO | PDO-IT-1542 | No |
| IGP Sicilia | Biancolilla, Cerasuola | Sicilia | PGI | PGI-IT-01305 | Yes — Sicilia, PDO-IT-A0801, wine |
| IGP Calabria | Carolea | Olio di Calabria | PGI | PGI-IT-01314 | Yes — Calabria, PGI-IT-A0637, wine |
| Monocultivar Ravece | Ravece | None claimed | — | — | — |
| Centopercento | Coratina, Ogliarola, Carolea | None claimed | — | — | — |
The register makes two things clear that a shelf never will. The first is that four of these five place names are shared with a wine appellation, and the two entries are separate registrations with separate file numbers — Sicilia is a PGI for olive oil and a PDO for wine, which is the same word carrying two different levels of protection for two different products. The second is that the Calabrian olive oil is registered as “Olio di Calabria”, not as “Calabria”. A bottle labelled “IGP Calabria” is a reasonable shorthand, but the protected olive oil name has the word for oil built into it, and the bare word on its own belongs to wine.
The Ravece bottle is worth a separate note, because it is the one nearest home. Basso says the Ravece olives come almost entirely from the province of Avellino — and there is a registered olive oil PDO for exactly that area, Irpinia – Colline dell’Ufita, PDO-IT-0500, protected since September 2005. Basso does not claim it. It sells the oil as a monocultivar instead. That is not a criticism: plenty of good oils sit outside the designation that covers their ground, for reasons of yield, paperwork or blending freedom. But if you assumed the Avellino connection implied a PDO, it does not.
What Basso Publishes — and What It Doesn’t
Basso publishes a long list of third-party certifications on its own about page: BRCGS Food Safety, IFS Food, Kosher, Halal Italia, EU organic, USDA Organic, JAS Organic, Canada Organic, and Sedex with a SMETA report. It also publishes its ethical code and that SMETA report as downloadable documents. Taken together, that is a serious audit trail for a business of this size, and it deserves to be said plainly.
What none of it contains is a number about the oil. We read the English half of the company’s own sitemap — fifty pages — and pulled all eighteen products from the Sabino Basso shop through its own store interface. Across every one of them there is no free acidity figure, no peroxide value, no ultraviolet absorbance value, no polyphenol content in milligrams per kilogram, and no harvest or pressing date. The nearest thing to a chemical claim is a line on the Ravece page attributing its bitterness and pepperiness to a high polyphenol content, with no figure attached. Basso also makes a nutritional argument for the suspended solids in its unfiltered line; we do not repeat brand health claims, ours or anyone else’s.
| What a buyer might want | Basso (Olio Basso and Sabino Basso) | Sidr & Stone |
|---|---|---|
| Grade stated per line | Yes | Yes — extra virgin |
| Origin stated | Country or countries per line; region on the designated bottles | One named family-owned grove on the plains outside Marrakech, Morocco |
| Cultivars named | Yes, on every olive oil line | Not published |
| Filtration stated | Stated on the Fedele line; not stated elsewhere | Unfiltered, stated |
| Free acidity (FFA) | Not published | Not published |
| Peroxide value | Not published | Not published |
| Polyphenols in mg/kg | Not published | Not published |
| Harvest or pressing date | Not published | Not published |
| Third-party certifications | BRCGS, IFS Food, Kosher, Halal Italia, EU/USDA/JAS/Canada Organic, Sedex–SMETA | Halal certified; organically grown, not certified organic |
Three objections are worth meeting head-on. The first: a multi-country blend is not automatically worse than a single origin. That is true. A skilled blender working with named cultivars can make a consistent, pleasant oil year after year, and Basso’s Classic line is built to do exactly that. The problem with vague origin is vagueness, not blending.
The second: is naming cultivars and countries not enough? It is a great deal, and better than most. But cultivar and country describe what went in, not what came out. Free acidity, peroxide value and polyphenol content describe the oil in the bottle you are actually buying, and they are the figures that move with harvest timing, handling and age.
The third is the fairest one, and it points at us. We do not publish a polyphenol figure for our own oil either. Our first harvest has not yet shipped, we have not had a panel run, and we would rather write “not published” in a table than print a number we cannot stand behind. When we have one, it will appear here with the laboratory named.
How to Read a Basso Bottle Before You Buy
Four checks, in this order, will tell you almost everything.
- Find the grade word. “Extra virgin olive oil” and plain “olive oil” are different products under the same brand. On a Basso label the difference is real: one is mechanically extracted juice, the other has been refined and blended back.
- Read the origin line, not the flag. “100% Italian” means Italian olives. “Of the European Union” means a blend across Spain, Italy and Greece. Both are legitimate; they are not the same thing. Our guide to what “Italian” actually means on a bottle covers why that distinction is so easy to miss.
- Check whether it is filtered. Only the Fedele line is declared unfiltered, and it will show natural cloudiness and sediment — normal, and explained in our guide to unfiltered versus filtered olive oil.
- Match the cultivar to what you want it for. Coratina is Puglia’s bitter, robust variety and dominates the Italian lines; the Sicilian bottle is Biancolilla and Cerasuola, a gentler and more aromatic pairing.
For a fuller walkthrough of the signals worth checking on any bottle, whoever made it, see our guide to choosing a quality olive oil.
Why Sidr & Stone
The reason we went through Basso’s range in this much detail is that it is a fair example of the honest limit of a large, well-run bottler: you can be told a great deal about where the olives came from and almost nothing about the oil. We have built our own olive oil the other way round — one grove, one harvest, and a short chain we can describe end to end.
- Single-estate — one family-owned grove on the plains outside Marrakech, Morocco, with no blending across origins.
- Rain-fed — no irrigation; the trees take what the season gives them.
- Organically grown — no synthetic fertilisers, pesticides, or herbicides.
- Single harvest — a small, limited batch; once the season’s pressing is gone, it is gone until next year.
- Cold-pressed within hours of harvest — to preserve flavour, aroma, and polyphenols.
- Unfiltered extra virgin — minimally processed, and it may show a little natural sediment, which is normal for an honest unfiltered oil.
- 100% natural — a single ingredient, olive oil, with nothing added.
- Dark glass with a gold label — to protect the oil from light.
- Halal certified.
- 10% of profits to charity — a commitment that applies to every Sidr & Stone product.
- Fulfilment in the UK, EU, and US.
We will not tell you Sidr & Stone is the best olive oil — that would be the very claim this article warns against. What we will say is that our oil is single-estate Moroccan, rain-fed, organically grown, and cold-pressed within hours of harvest — and that the evidence of that care is in the taste, the colour, and the season’s small limited batch.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Basso olive oil?
Basso is an Italian olive oil brand owned by Basso Fedele & Figli S.r.l. of San Michele di Serino, in the province of Avellino, Campania. The name covers a broad everyday range sold as Olio Basso and a smaller protected-origin selection sold as Sabino Basso.
Who makes Basso olive oil, and where?
Basso Fedele & Figli S.r.l., in the industrial zone of San Michele di Serino, Avellino. The company gives 1904 as the start of its story and says a mill was built at San Michele di Serino under Sabino Basso in the 1980s. Its olives come from Italy, Spain and Greece depending on the line.
Is all Basso olive oil extra virgin?
No. Basso sells extra virgin, organic extra virgin, an unfiltered extra virgin, and a plain “olive oil” that is refined oil blended with virgin oil, alongside olive pomace oil and a range of seed oils. The grade word on the label is what decides which you have.
What is the difference between Olio Basso and Sabino Basso?
They are two brands from the same company — both sites carry the VAT number IT00657990644. Olio Basso is the everyday range in litre bottles and catering tins. Sabino Basso is a small selection of 500ml bottles, several of them carrying registered PDO or PGI designations.
Is Basso olive oil cold pressed?
Basso states mechanical cold extraction below 27°C for its extra virgin lines, and says the olives for its unfiltered and organic lines are milled within four hours of picking. Below 27°C is the threshold that governs the regulated terms “cold pressed” and “cold extraction” on an olive oil label.
Does Basso publish an acidity or polyphenol figure?
No. Across the English pages of its own site and every product listing on the Sabino Basso shop, Basso publishes no free acidity, no peroxide value, no ultraviolet absorbance figures, no polyphenol content and no harvest date. It does publish cultivars, origin and a long list of third-party certifications.
Where can I buy Basso olive oil?
Basso is sold widely through Italian delicatessens, online grocers and marketplace listings in the UK and the United States, and the company also runs its own shop for the Sabino Basso selection. Availability of individual lines varies a great deal by country.
Is olive oil a medicine?
No. Olive oil is a food, not a medicine. It has a long traditional history — including being honoured in the Prophetic Sunnah — and a substantial body of modern research, particularly around polyphenols, cardiovascular health, and the Mediterranean diet pattern. It can be a worthwhile part of a healthy routine, but it does not cure diseases and is not a substitute for medical care. Be cautious of any olive oil marketed with specific disease-cure claims.
Final Thoughts
Basso is a good brand to think with, because it fails and succeeds in instructive ways. It succeeds at the thing most of the aisle avoids: it tells you which olives, from which countries, extracted how, on every line it sells, and it prints an honest description of what refining actually does. It is audited to standards that cost money to hold. None of that is nothing.
What it does not do is tell you anything measurable about the oil itself. The gap between “Coratina from Apulia, cold-extracted below 27°C” and a free acidity figure with a date attached is the gap between a description of intent and a description of result — and it is the gap almost the entire category is still standing in.
So the useful question when you pick up a Basso bottle is not whether the brand is any good. It is which Basso you have, what grade it is, where the olives grew, and whether that is enough for what you want the oil to do. If it is a litre for the pan, it very likely is. If you are buying something to pour raw over a plate at the end of the year, ask for more.
Our cold-pressed organic Marrakech olive oil — single-estate, rain-fed, organically grown, and cold-pressed within hours of harvest — is available to pre-order, with fulfilment in the UK, EU, and US. First harvest, estimated shipping from November 2026.
Pre-Order Sidr & Stone Organic Marrakech Olive Oil — Limited First Harvest →
Disclaimer: This article describes Basso’s published range, certifications and designations as they stood on the company’s own websites at the time of writing; product specifications, brand practices and register entries may change, and readers should check current sources. Designations were verified against eAmbrosia, the European Commission’s public register of geographical indications. Comparisons are made in good faith and in fair terms. Olive oil is a food, not a medicine, and is not a substitute for medical treatment of any condition. For any health concern, consult a qualified medical professional.