An Overview of the Purity Characteristics, Pigments, and Tocopherol Contents of 48 Virgin Olive Oils from Apulian Minor Olive Accessions

Together with the most diffused olive cultivars used for virgin olive oil (VOO) extraction, Apulia boasts a plethora of other minor varieties and accessions whose oil characteristics is little or no studied at all. The main novelty of this study is then providing new insights about selected characteristics of 48 VOOs extracted from underexplored Apulian olive accessions. VOOs were extracted at laboratory scale and characterized for their fatty acid and sterol composition, pigments, and total tocopherol contents. Moreover, multivariate approaches were used to study VOOs similarity based on purity criteria. The results show that some VOOs had percentages of specific fatty acids or sterols out of current international limits. This was already observed in previous studies and should be taken into account by regulatory bodies and policy makers. The multivariate analysis of the dataset by PCA and k-means clustering allow to identify the VOO from San Benedetto variety as the most peculiar and, on the whole, a total of five different clusters of samples. Pigments and tocopherols ranges are wide among the oils, highlighting possible candidates for further valorization.