There is a small scandal on the Italian olive oil scene these days.
Through a quirk in the way Europe's olive oil labeling laws are written, the "Product of" label signifies the location of the bottler -- not the source of the olives themselves. And the Italian olive oil companies have used this loophole their advantage. In fact, much of the mass produced "Italian" olive oil is made from either Spanish or Turkish olives. This makes a lot of sense to anyone who has ever driven through Andalusia in southern Spain, where you can drive for hundreds of miles and see nothing but millions of olive trees. While there is a big push within Spain to increase international brand awareness of Spanish olive oil, they are still a large exporter of unprocessed olives.
Italy, on the other hand, doesn't even have enough olive trees to support its own domestic consumption -- let alone a major oil export market.
The scandal has been interesting to watch, as spokespeople for the large olive oil companies have publicly defended their olive import practices. The head of one hundred+ year old Italian olive oil company (he's a minor royal) went to great pains to explain in a newspaper article why it is the Italian "blending" expertise that make non-Italian Italian olive oil so great. Our view is that if you extended this logic to wine, the great champagne houses of France and the Napa and Sonoma wineries could buy all of their grapes from Modesto, and make up the difference with their great skill at blending.
There are a couple of ways of making sure your high-end tasting oil is great. The first is to taste your oil. We have had many tasting parties, where we put out 4-6 oils, and taste the various olive oils with bread. It's fun to see where the group, and individual tastes lie. Also, the Italians have created a DOP (Denominazione d'Originione Protetore) system, which creates strict guidelines for how specific oils are produced, including which types of olives are used and where they are grown. Much like the Vera Pizza Napoletana specification, these standards were created to create a safe "brand" around certain products --- including olive oil. Our favorite Italian olive oil is a DOP from Bari (in the mid-south), with apologies to the Tuscan producers.
Our local San Gimignano growers think the scandal is good. A locally grown extra virgin oil costs about 10 Euros (about $12) a liter, while the mass produced oils cost about 3-4 Euros (about $3.60-$4.80) at the local supermarket. One grower told us that he thought the supermarket olive oil was only good enough to be "lamp oil."
Regardless, the scandal puts into perspective the horrible olive oil that the large producers are selling in supermarkets in the states. We all know who we are talking about here, and the products are terrible. Just say no. They are too expensive for what they really are, and most of them aren't even good enough for cooking.
If you follow our strategy of using a great high-end oil for salads and eating, and a quality mass produced oil only for cooking, this revelation probably isn't that important to you. In the states, we cook with either Trader Joe's or Costco Extra Virgin Olive Oil, and shop around to find great tasting oils for salads, grilled meats and soups. In Italy, we buy 3-5L jugs of supermarket olive oil for cooking (and it probably comes from Spain), and the oil from our local frantoio di San Gimignano for our salad oil. The oil costs 50 Euros (about $60) for 5 liters, and it is incredible. Green, fresh, cloudy, grassy and spicy (but not too hot), it comes from the trees owned by the city. There are trees all around the citiy, including the park behind our house where we take our daughters. The frantoio does a premium picking and pressing before Christmas, and makes a special "nuovo" bottling.
To keep things interesting, we also buy special regional olive oils every time we travel. That is how we found the DOP di Bari.
About the Author
James Bairey, a former Silicon Valley marketing executive, is CEO of Forno Bravo, LLC, a supplier of Italian Wood-Fired Pizza Ovens and Brick Pizza Ovens and Italian">www.fornobravo.com/ pizza-ingredients/index.html">Italian Pizza Ingredients for home owners and pizzerias.