What is Extra-Virgin anyway and Why Should You (or I) Care?

Maurizio Castelli is part of a small club that I call my olive oil gurus, a club so exclusive its members probably don’t even know they belong. More than that, Maurizio is widely acknowledged as one of Italy’s leading experts on the cultivation of olives and the production of high-class oil. He is the talent behind some important New World endeavors too—not the super-high-density, get-it-out-and-sell-it-fast operations but more thoughtful, slow, traditional estates like the award-winning McEvoy Ranch in Marin County, California. So I listen carefully when Maurizio speaks. And right now he is speaking half-jokingly but with an edge of seriousness of the American woman who asked him about the olive trees that are spread in silvery profusion down a terraced Tuscan hillside: Were they extra-virgin olive trees, she wanted to know, or just the regular kind?

No, Maurizio explained with great patience, there is no such thing as an extra-virgin olive tree, nor are there extra-virgin olives. But extra-virgin olive oil is very real and there is more of it than ever before, in part because of improved production methods, as I noted in the previous chapter, and in part because of market demand. (Not all of that is truly extra-virgin and some of it is not olive oil, or not entirely olive oil, but I will get to that later.)

Producers are scrambling to fill that demand as more and more consumers around the world clamor for olive oil, even in unlikely places such as China and India. Olive oil imports in China soared in the past decade, from an insignificant 605 tons in 2002 to more than 108,000 tons in 2011. And who would believe that “health-conscious, upwardly mobile Indian consumers,” in the words of a recent business publication, would make olive oil “the cooking medium of choice”? Is India not the land of ghee?[1]

So what is this extra-virgin olive oil and why should I—or you—care?

Let’s start with the definition of “virgin olive oil.” Back in the eighteenth century, and for a long time thereafter, virgin olive oil, which was always considered the finest kind, referred to an oil that had not been pressed at all. The olives were crushed, using the big stone wheels, and then the oil that naturally floated to the top of the paste was carefully skimmed off—and that was virgin. Apart from crushing, the olives and their paste experienced no stress and certainly were not subject to crude treatments such as having boiling water poured over the paste to extract more oil, a common practice back then. Alfredo Mancianti’s “Affiorato” oil, made on the shores of Lake Trasimeno in Umbria, and “Flor del Aceite,” made by Nuñez de Prado in Baena, Andalusia, are both examples of this free-run kind of oil. But it is rare, and priced accordingly.

The International Olive Council (IOC)[2] is an industry group chartered by the United Nations in 1959 to promote consumption of olive oil of all kinds. IOC members include almost all the major olive oil–producing countries—as countries, not as companies—from Albania to Turkey (notably absent are the United States and Australia, two countries that show every intention of becoming important producers). The IOC defines the various categories of olive oil in a way that has become, for its member states, the legal classification. Virgin olive oil’s definition is straightforward: It is “obtained from the fruit of the olive tree (Olea europea L.), solely by mechanical or other physical means [my italics], under conditions, particularly thermal conditions, that do not lead to alterations in the oil.” Furthermore, olives and oil must not undergo any treatment other than washing, decanting, centrifuging, and filtering.

What this means in practical terms is that olives, and only olives,[3] are crushed, pressed, and extracted mechanically, using either traditional milling (crush-and-press) or modern continuous-cycle techniques, but no chemical solvents or other nonmechanical methods (such as steam deodorizing), and without the application of heat above 27°C (80.6°F) at any point in the process. So think of virgin olive oil as simply the juice of olives, decanted or centrifuged after processing to separate the oil from the vegetable water in the fruit, and possibly but not necessarily filtered at the end. The definition also excludes from the virgin category any olive oil that has been mixed with even a bare minimum of other kinds of oil. It goes without saying that, for the oil to be good quality, the olives themselves should be fresh, sound, and healthy, and they should be processed at an appropriate stage of ripeness, as described in the previous chapter.

So much for virgin olive oil. And I defy you to find a bottle of it on a shop shelf anywhere in America[4]—or in Italy, for that matter. It’s what my Australian colleague Brian Chatterton, who produces excellent extra-virgin oil in Umbria, has aptly called “ghost oil,” much talked about but almost never seen. “Use extra-virgin for drizzling,” chirps the usual food blog, “and virgin oil for cooking.” Ask that food blogger where she gets her virgin oil and she will be stumped. Because it simply does not exist commercially.

What does exist, and is widely available on shop shelves all over North America, is extra-virgin olive oil, and here we move up a notch, or two or three. Extra-virgin olive oil is extracted by those same mechanical methods that define just plain virgin, but it has several characteristics that move it into a more exalted position. Most important, in laboratory tests the oil must have a free acidity, expressed as oleic acid, of not more than 0.8 percent—no more than 0.8 grams of free oleic acid per 100 grams of oil. Chem 101 alert: Free acidity is caused by the breakdown of triglycerides in the oil due to hydrolysis or lipolysis. I don’t understand what that means but I know it is a measure of degradation in the oil and it has nothing to do with an acid flavor. I have to repeat that: Oils that are unacceptably high in free oleic acid do not necessarily taste acidic or sour. In fact, you will probably not be able to detect by taste or smell alone a high acid content.

But the most important thing for you to know is that producers of premium olive oil would slit their wrists and sell their oil to the nearest biodiesel plant if it tested out anywhere close to the 0.8 percent free oleic acid that the IOC permits. The producers I know and have encountered over the years count on a free acid measurement no higher than 0.2 percent, and 0.1 percent is optimum.

There are other laboratory measures of quality required by the IOC, including testing for peroxide levels, which indicate the amount of oxidation to which the oil has been subjected. The IOC definition of extra-virgin oil permits a peroxide level of 20 mep (whatever that means) but, again, conscientious producers of premium oils want peroxide levels down around 5 or 6 mep, no more, which is to say, a quarter or less of what the IOC allows.

The overall IOC parameters for extra-virgin, in other words, are generous, much more so than conscientious producers of high-quality oils would accept in their own oils. And the hurdles for extra-virgin qualification are set much too low. In brief, just because an oil qualifies as extra-virgin doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s any good.

Beyond laboratory testing, however, to be categorized as extra-virgin, the oil must also pass a taste test. This is a completely blind tasting by a panel of at least eight trained professional tasters. Just as with wine, just as with tea, just as with chocolate, these tasters have undergone rigorous training, supervised by the IOC, to evaluate olive oil for “perfect organoleptic characteristics”—meaning the oil must have perfect flavor and aroma, with no discernible defects whatsoever. Professional tasters will tell you this is easy, but believe me it is not. For nonprofessionals, even for people like me who’ve been around a lot of olive oil over the years, defects can slip past—and just a little vinegary or musty note in the oil will be sufficient to knock it out of the extra-virgin category. Beyond that, perfection is such a delicate, even fragile, concept, that I often think it is best considered an attribute of divinity rather than of mere olive oil. But there are those, and there have been those down through the ages, who have associated olive oil directly with divinity in any case, so perhaps I am splitting hairs.

Professional tasting, it cannot be denied, is a serious business. A great deal of money can ride on whether or not an oil merits extra-virginity. The scientific laboratory criteria (free acidity, peroxide content, and so forth) are specific and measurable, but tasting itself is a relative business at best, so conclusions are never reached based on one person’s opinion alone, but rather on a consensus. And tasting, in the end, is what counts. An oil might pass the lab tests with three stars for excellence and still fail the taste test with mustiness or fustiness, or muddy or vinegary flavors, any or all of which will disqualify it. And a single dissent on the tasting panel can be enough to kick an otherwise deserving oil out of the extra-virgin category.

Tasters sit in a room together, but each person is in an enclosed cubicle with no opportunity for communication among them. The samples are doled out anonymously, each oil in a blue tasting glass—blue to disguise completely the color of the oil—that can be easily cupped in the palm of the hand. The cupping is important because warming the oil to body temperature helps to release volatile aromas and flavors. So the taster sits, swirling oil in the glass in the palm of one hand with the palm of the other hand securing a flat glass lid, until the oil has reached body heat, whereupon the taster opens the lid a little and takes a deep sniff, or two or three, to inhale all the ephemeral fragrances. Then back goes the lid for another swirl, another lift of the lid, and the taster sips from the glass, not more than a teaspoon or so of oil, holds it on the tongue, presses it out to the sides of the mouth, then inhales sharply, stretching the mouth to draw in air through the sides, slurping the oil. Finally, carefully considering, the taster swallows, and then notes all applicable impressions.

Like riding a bicycle, this sounds much more complicated than it actually is.

But what is the purpose of the ritual—for ritual it most certainly is? First off, the aromas: They hardly need explanation, but it is primarily fruitiness, or lack of it, that is detected through the initial smelling. Then, once the oil is in the mouth, it is sensed by all those tiny papillae on the surface of the tongue—bitterness is especially apparent on the sides of the tongue, and then in the back, as the oil is swallowed, the sensation of pungency is paramount. Actually, as you probably know, our human perception of taste, as such, is limited to sweetness, sourness, saltiness, and bitterness, the four tastes that the tongue distinguishes. (Many people now agree on a fifth sensation, called by the Japanese term umami, but that “meaty” taste doesn’t seem to apply to olive oil.) So the complexity of flavors in olive oil is not really tasted so much as it is smelled or experienced by what professional tasters call a retronasal gustatory sensation or retronasal olfaction—a mouthful of words to describe the way almost every “taste,” from orange juice to fine wine to cheap beer, is actually most fully experienced by swallowing and passing the substance through the retronasal area (the “internal nares”) in the back of the throat so that aroma and flavor become combined.

What is in that complexity of flavors in extra-virgin olive oil? Taste and aroma depend on so many factors, starting with the cultivar or variety of the olive itself and its maturity at harvest, then the climate and soil structure where the tree grows, the weather throughout the growing season, and the precise moment when the harvest occurs. To a great extent it also depends on how the olives are treated after harvest, how quickly they are milled and under what conditions, and how the oil is handled once it has been made.

Just as with grapes, different cultivars have very different flavors—and the flavors differ too depending on the degree of ripeness of the fruit, the time and manner of the processing, and indeed the way the oil has been handled in the pipeline from producer to consumer. Some olives taste of almonds, others of green apples; some have ripe tropical fruit flavors like mangoes or melons; some taste of freshly cut grass or artichokes. There’s a cultivar called Grignano, for instance, that grows in a small area of northern Italy, east of Lake Garda in the province of Verona; picked and processed at a certain moment in October, Grignano olives have a decided citrus flavor and aroma that comes from the olives themselves and not from any lemons or other citrus added during the processing.[5] Harvested three weeks later, Grignano oil, while still being very good, will lack that distinction. Another example is Arbequina, a typical olive from Catalonia, where the oil produced has a distinctive and delicious flavor, when fresh, of almonds; but Arbequina produced from olives grown in other parts of the globe—for instance, in California or Chile, where it is a favorite cultivar for super-high-density planting—is simply a bland oil that needs blending with other, different cultivars to create an oil of character.

No matter what the variety, however, all oils should have easily discernible flavors of the olive fruit itself, whether the fruit is ripe, green, or on the way to maturity, with no off-flavors, nothing metallic or musty; and this fruity flavor should be most apparent when the oil is fresh and new. Bitterness and pungency, contrary to what you might have thought, are not defects, but positive attributes, indicating the strong presence of valuable polyphenols. These qualities will diminish as the oil ages, and some connoisseurs prefer softer oils that are past their peak of freshness for this very reason. By June, even the most pungent Koroneiki oil from Greece or Coratina from Italy, made the previous autumn, will have calmed and become detectably sweeter. The hot flavors just post-harvest, so exciting to taste, will be replaced by a roundness on the palate; one can almost speak of the tranquility of oils in that stage.

Beyond fruitiness, bitterness, and pungency, professional tasters recognize many different flavors, most of which are positive traits in extra-virgin oils. An oil can taste of ripe fruitiness or, on the contrary, of green, immature fruitiness. Sweeter oils, often made from riper olives, may have flavors of apple, or ripe tomato, or of nuts such as almonds or hazelnuts; green sensations in oils are described as flavors of artichoke or green tomato, sweet green pepper, or even herbal flavors of freshly cut grass. Intense flavors may depend more on the age of the oil, with fresher oils obviously having much greater intensity and a robust concentration of flavor, while older oils can be smooth and mellow, almost buttery. But that contrast, too, can depend on variety. Flavor in olive oil is an ever-changing, ever-intriguing subject. The best way to experience it and begin to understand it is through tasting a gamut of four to six oils, made from different cultivars and from different regions. If you’ve never done this, you may be astonished by the differences that are easy to distinguish even if you can’t quite describe them yet. And you don’t need “official” blue tasting glasses—a simple wineglass with a bowl small enough to cup in the hand will do very nicely.

Of course, and I regret to say it, some oils unfortunately are also redolent of all those musty, muddy, fusty, rancid flavors we have met with frequently in this book. And some oils, indeed, taste of nothing at all, meaning they are so old and flat by the time they reach your palate that all the aromatic properties you might once have enjoyed have completely vanished.

Now, diverging briefly from extra-virgin, there are other classes of olive oil defined by the International Olive Council, but you will not see them as such on the shelves of your local supermarket. Virgin oil is one, but, as noted, it hardly exists except in the minds of the IOC classifiers. The lowest quality of all is called lampante, and it is a seriously defective oil, as its Italian name indicates, an oil that is only good for lighting lamps. Even though it is “virgin,” meaning produced mechanically, it is not intended for human consumption.

What you will see at the supermarket, however, is another highly visible category of oil. This is simply called “olive oil,” or sometimes, but more rarely these days, “pure olive oil,” suggesting, quite incorrectly, that it is somehow purer and better than extra-virgin. This is oil that, for whatever reason, failed to make the extra-virgin grade, either because the olives were defective in the beginning or because of a fault in the milling, a time delay being the most common problem. This substandard oil is then rectified or refined to remove all its nasty flavors and aromas, and the result is a tasteless, odorless, colorless oil to which a small amount of extra-virgin is then added in order to give it some character. In effect, the polyphenols are removed from the oil, leaving a product that is still rich in monounsaturated fatty acids, which are good for you, but deprived of the polyphenols and antioxidants, which are even better for you. It’s perfectly fine to use in a pinch, and some cooks prefer this to extra-virgin olive oil, especially for deep-fat frying. I don’t. I take my cue from generations of Mediterranean cooks at all levels, from the humblest homestead to the most exalted restaurant kitchen, and only cook with extra-virgin olive oil.

In the United States, you may also come across an olive oil marketed as pomace oil or olio di pomace; while other grades of olive oil can be used in an economic pinch, pomace oil is, in my view, to be avoided at all costs. It is extracted from the waste of the oil mill by the use of chemical solvents and undergoes further refinement to remove the solvents, at which point it is said to be fit for human consumption—but I do not trust it. And with good oil available, why bother? Still, 5 percent of the 300,000 tons of olive oil imported into the United States in the 2011–2012 season consisted of pomace oil, most of it destined for food service or for packaging (for example, canned sauces, tinned fish products, mayonnaise made with olive oil, and the like).

There is actually far more high-quality extra-virgin olive oil offered today than at any time in the past. In that same season of 2011–2012, nearly two-thirds of U.S. imports consisted of what the IOC calls “virgin grade,” which is almost exclusively extra-virgin. This is a huge change from the past. Until recently, no import statistics distinguishing between extra-virgin and just plain or pure olive oil were available, but it was clear to people in the trade that extra-virgin represented a very small portion of the overall quantity of imported oil even as late as the 1990s.[6]

Partly the increase in availability of extra-virgin olive oil is the result of modern technology that makes it possible to harvest and process oil much more rapidly, and partly it’s because of consumer demand. As more and more health-giving properties of extra-virgin oil have been confirmed, consumption has increased dramatically. At the same time, olive oil has become a signature, the mark of an up-to-date kitchen; restaurant chefs, more and more, turn to it to show off their prowess. Alas, far too many restaurant chefs, at all levels of the profession, don’t really understand high-quality olive oil, how to select it and how to use it in their kitchens. Thus we have the unhappy phenomenon of defective extra-virgin olive oil, rancid or fusty or simply old and flat, displayed in a tasting dish, possibly disguised with a dollop of what purports to be “balsamic” vinegar or a sprinkling of dried culinary herbs, proudly presented to restaurant patrons along with bread for dipping in it.

What it takes to make high-quality extra-virgin olive oil, as we saw in the previous chapter, is this: Sound, healthy olives from well-maintained orchards, harvested by hand or by the gentlest of machines, at a point of maturity that precedes, but not by too much, full ripeness, crushed and milled in a scrupulously clean environment within 24 hours of picking, and stored in stainless-steel containers in a cool, dark space. This is not rocket science. It is exactly what my family does on our Tuscan olive oil farmlet (apart from the rapid processing, which is impossible for us to achieve), like thousands of other growers and producers, large and small alike. It’s a fully transparent process followed right around the olive oil world, from the Mediterranean to the newest areas of cultivation in California, Australia, South Africa, and even China. Not only that, but it’s a process that, apart from improved technology, is essentially unchanged down through the ages—it comes with a millennial guarantee of history and of tradition behind it.

What, then, goes wrong? Because, although as I’ve said there is far more high-quality olive oil available today, there is also a vast ocean of bad and even fraudulent oil. I define bad oil as honestly made extra-virgin oil that has been severely mishandled en route to the consumer or kept until it is over the hill. Fraudulent oil is oil that has been deliberately made to defraud consumers, either by mixing refined oil with extra-virgin or by marketing other oils as extra-virgin when they’ve never come near an olive. Hazelnut oil is a prime candidate for this treatment, but even soy oil can be doctored with additives to make it taste just enough like olive oil to convince naive consumers.

And not just in the United States. We Americans have been told over and over in recent years that we are uniquely targeted by European scam artists, principally but not entirely Italian (hence, an unspoken assertion, most likely run by the mob), who are intent on dumping bad oil on our innocent and ingenuous salads. The assertion is not without an element of truth, but the fact is that bad oil is a round-the-world phenomenon. It is just as easy to find very bad oil on the shelves of Italian, Spanish, Turkish, French, you-name-it supermarkets as it is to find it in North American markets. Olive oil producer Gemma Pasquali leads remarkably informed and informative olive oil tastings at Villa Campestri, her family hotel in northern Tuscany’s Mugello valley. She always begins with a defective oil as a baseline for mediocrity, and she has no trouble at all finding an example or two at her local supermarket. No, the major difference between there (Italy) and here (North America) is that it is much easier there than here to have access to high-quality oil. But the bad stuff? The indifferent stuff? It’s everywhere in the world, including in far too many high-end restaurants.

The two most common defects in olive oil are rancidity and fustiness, and they are almost ubiquitous in what I call, for brevity’s sake, supermarket oils. That they are also prevalent in oils sold in many fine, upscale gourmet stores and exclusive restaurants also goes without saying. The simple reason is that most of us, including shopkeepers and chefs, are profoundly ignorant of what high-quality oil tastes like, what it ought to taste like. When Gemma Pasquali opens her tasting sessions with a rancid oil, you can look around the table and see heads nodding in familiar acknowledgment: “Mmhmm, this is olive oil, this is what we expect.” And then she moves on—offering perhaps an oil from the Monte Iblei in the southeastern corner of Sicily, followed by a prized Andalusian Picual from the south of Spain or a Greek oil from Kalamata or a fresh, lemony oil from Verona in northern Italy or a high-grade California oil from Marin County, and then ending with the oil produced from her family’s trees just outside the door. And as she progresses through the tastings, moving from the green tomato flavors of the Sicilian oil to the spiciness of the Picual and the richness of the Kalamata to the prodigious complex of flavors in the Tuscan oil, expressions change from murmurs of recognition to astonished explosions. “Wow!” you hear from one corner of the tasting table and then from another: “Wow! Amazing!”

“I had no idea olive oil could have such a range of flavors,” the editor of an important American food publication said after one such tasting, blinking as she emerged into the sunlight from the cool depths of the stone-walled tasting room in the villa’s old wine cantina. “I’ve always loved olive oil but I had no idea it could be so good.” She was eloquent in her simplicity, and she echoed the thoughts of most people who experience the flavors of truly fresh, well-made oils for the first time.

The fact is that our palates have learned over the years to expect and to accept rancidity and fustiness (the two defects often go hand in hand) in olive oil, so much so that we often see these two characteristics not as faults but as positive attributes. “Very buttery,” said the owner of a retail shop near my home in Maine, proudly offering me a taste of a new French oil he had just received. But buttery in his view was unquestionably fusty in mine.

What does “fusty” taste like? A little like the taste of certain table olives, whether green or black, that are purposely meant to undergo some fermentation during processing. But what is desirable in table olives is not necessarily so in oil. Fustiness comes about when olives are kept too long piled up, at the mill or the farmhouse, before pressing. The interior of the pile begins to undergo a kind of anaerobic fermentation that produces the characteristic flavor. (To me, “fusty” tastes like, if you can imagine it, a bale of hay that’s been left on the barn floor all winter. The damp, slightly rotten fragrance of that hay is for me the fragrance of fustiness.)

Fustiness can also be deliberately induced in olive oil. Jean-Benoît Hugues makes an intentionally fusty oil at his domain near Les Baux de Provence, where the gnarled and ancient olives were famously painted by van Gogh. “We started because our neighbors asked for it,” he explained. “And then we decided to put it on the market.” He looked a little wistful when he said: “I sometimes think you don’t get the true taste of a Provençal aioli except with fusty oil.” Jean-Benoît and his wife, Cathérine, make an excellent extra-virgin oil, called Castelas, which is exported to the United States; their fusty oil, also sold in North America under the brand name Fruité Noir, is one of the very few oils marketed as “virgin,” not “extra-virgin,” because of this resolute flaw, which absolutely knocks it out of the extra-virgin category.

As for rancidity, although it can happen when already rancid olives are pressed for oil, it’s a defect that most often occurs post-production because of improper storage and handling of the oil. The term refers to the decomposition of fats and oils, especially unsaturated fats and oils, when they are exposed to light, heat, and atmosphere. You don’t need a trained nose to recognize it. Most cooks have had the experience of rancid walnuts or whole wheat flour, two foods that spoil as easily as olive oil, and for the same reasons. In fact, it’s the oils themselves, naturally present in walnuts and whole wheat flour, that rancidify or oxidize. Extra-virgin olive oil, because of the antioxidants that we taste as bitterness, astringency, and pungency, is naturally protected against oxidation, but eventually, unless it’s carefully stored, even olive oils that are very high in antioxidants (such as Picual from Spain, Koroneiki from Greece, or Coratina from southern Italy) will turn rancid.[7]

One year as an experiment, I poured some of our bright and lively fresh-from-the-mill oil into a glass mason jar and left it standing on a sunny window ledge in the kitchen. Within a week. it was transformed from healthy green to a pallid yellow color, and after another week, all its vigorous flavors and aromas were gone, replaced by a decided taste of turpentine, the result of chemical transformations in the oil. Despite antioxidant polyphenols, olive oil is extremely fragile. Yet again, a lot depends on the cultivar and the amount and structure of the polyphenols therein. Our oil is made from Leccino olives, not notably high in antioxidants. Had I been able to make a single-cultivar oil from the few Frantoio trees in our orchard, it would most likely have stood up better to my harsh treatment. But not forever.

The uncomfortable fact is that most rancid and fusty oils are not seen as defective by the public. On the contrary, in a great many tastings over the years it’s the slightly rancid, decidedly fusty oils that too often win top billing. Even at tastings conducted by “gourmet” journalists and their publications, self-styled food experts to a man or a woman, the prize most often goes to oils that any truly educated taster recognizes as seriously defective. Both Cook’s Illustrated and Bon Appétit are guilty of promoting oils that are quite obviously—to an expert, that is—deficient.

Such persistent consumer ignorance creates big problems for producers. In California a survey by the Olive Center, the University of California at Davis’s research program, showed that most Californians surveyed actually preferred the taste of fusty, slightly rancid oil. No surprises there, but the experts were confounded when a similar survey in Spain, conducted by experts at the University of Jaén, right in the heart of the heart of Spain’s olive oil country, indicated that less than one-third of regular consumers of olive oil knew what the grade “olive oil” means (that is, a mixture of virgin olive oil and refined olive oil). A mere 3 percent of those surveyed got the definition right, and only 10 percent of respondents knew what a single-variety olive oil was. This comes despite recent labeling reforms that encourage producers to label bottles with much more information, including both origins and olive cultivars used. The authors of the UC Davis study suggested that consumer preferences for defective oils probably are due to the great amount of defective “extra-virgin” olive oil available on the market. But almost three-quarters of the consumers interviewed disliked the oils that were identified as high-quality by expert tasters.[8]

Paul Vossen, who oversees the olive oil sector for the University of California’s Extension Service, says marketers are simply giving consumers what they want and are used to. U.S. supermarkets are full of rancid and fusty oil, Vossen says. “Most restaurants serve rancid olive oil to their guests mixed with a bit of vinegar, and they love it.” Unfortunately, giving people what they want in this case is bad for their health. But Vossen, who is deeply involved in the promotion of California olive oil, is optimistic about the future. “Consumers will eventually learn what fresh, defect-free olive oil tastes like,” he says, “and they’ll prefer it to the rancid, fermented oil on the market now.”

And what’s the harm in the end? If most people like the flavors of rancidity and fustiness, and prefer what they call buttery fruit flavors, why not accept that and make it part of the parameters for olive oil excellence? I honestly don’t know how to answer that except to say that, just as we have learned to refuse corked wines and stale coffee, so we must learn to refuse rancid, fusty olive oil. Moreover, as Vossen indicated, it is indeed bad for you. Oxidation in our food is something we want to avoid. Nuts, grains, and oils with the distinctive taste of oxidation are not exactly poisonous, but if consumed steadily over the years they will do you no good and can in fact do a great deal of harm. (I’ll explain this a bit more in the next chapter.)

At the farm end, it’s easy to avoid these problems by focusing on good sound olives, harvesting early, and rushing olives to the mill. At the mill end, it’s also easier now than it has ever been in the past to process rapidly at low temperatures. But there is one critical place in the chain where everything falls apart—and unfortunately, most producers of fine oil have no way to intervene. By that I mean what I call the pipeline from the producer to the consumer.

In an ideal world, the distribution chain that connects these two, producer and consumer, would be as short as possible. That’s why, as I noted earlier, it’s easier to find really good oil in Italy or Spain or California, or wherever oil is produced, than it is in the rest of the world. For the rest of us, the ideal is seldom realized. The oil goes from producer to shipper to the dock and the container ship. Then across the Atlantic (or increasingly the Pacific, from Australia, New Zealand, and Chile) to another dock and another shipper, to the importer’s warehouse, and then out to subsidiary distributors and then finally, possibly months later, to the shelf of a gourmet food store in your neighborhood. The delays and the exposure, even inadvertently, to light and unacceptably high temperatures all work their nefarious magic on the oil in the bottle. And there are other perils along the way: A colleague has described a wooden container of olive oil that arrived with a customs seal on it declaring that the container had been deliberately exposed to very high temperatures in order to kill any organisms the wood itself might harbor. An excellent way to protect the U.S. environment from invasion by suspect bugs, but a terrible way to protect olive oil. Furthermore, once the oil actually arrives in that gourmet food store, an ignorant shopkeeper will all too often display, with great pride, his or her new arrivals—on a shelf under bright lights, if not actually in a sunny window. (A wise shopkeeper, though there are few of them around, would display one bottle only, and keep the rest in a dark, cool closet in the back of the shop.)

There have been several attempts to correct this situation. One of the most innovative is the so-called OliveToLive system developed by Tuscan oil maker Paolo Pasquali (father of Gemma, mentioned previously, and co-owner of Villa Campestri). In his system, which is intended for use in commercial enterprises, such as shops or restaurants, the oil, from the time it leaves the producer, is protected under nitrogen and maintained at low temperatures, then dispensed directly to the consumer. The distribution chain is as short as possible, practically from producer to consumer through only one intermediary. But it’s complex and involves an ungainly machine. It’s clearly not for everyone, and certainly not for the home kitchen. And Pasquali himself has been timid about marketing it.

The system originally depended for its supply of olive oils on evaluations by an organization called Tre E (three E’s—for excellence, ethics, and economics), which was founded at the prestigious Accademia dei Georgofili agricultural institute in Florence under the aegis of Claudio Peri, a chemical scientist with a passion for olive oil. Since a very high percentage of extra-virgin oils have what Peri calls, with exquisite politeness, “prominent sensorial defects,” he proposed to take olive oil “beyond extra-virgin,” to create a new culture of olive oil that would stress excellence above all and would monitor every aspect of oil from production through storage and distribution, eventually to uses of excellent olive oil in the kitchen and at the table. A distinguished panel of sensory scientists and other experts would select these premium oils and monitor them through production, then Pasquali’s OliveToLive would be the chief marketing arm.

In the event, the organization proved as unwieldy to operate as Pasquali’s machine, and it required an investment of time and money with very little by way of payback. On the whole, Spanish producers of mass-market oils—and the bulk of mass-market oils originate in Spain—have resisted the idea of superpremium oil; instead, their goal is to expand the market for Spain’s enormous overproduction of olive oil—and that does not mean high-quality extra-virgin. “All too often we think that producing an excellent oil will result in good business,” Dr. Peri noted reluctantly, “but this is absolutely false.”

The best solution to the problem of fraudulent oil, surely, is education—of consumers, importers, shopkeepers, chefs, restaurateurs, and every other link in the long distribution chain. And that education must begin with consumers who, once they understand what good, fresh olive oil tastes like, will refuse the rancid, fusty stuff on offer, just as they refuse rotten apples or sprouted potatoes, or meat or fish with a suspect odor, or corked wine or stale coffee. And just as you, the consumer, would return rotten apples or corked wine, so should you return rancid olive oil to the place where you bought it and demand a refund or a replacement.

Despite the accusations that must have seemed in the public eye to be an all-out campaign to tar Italian olive oil, it was Italian oils that once again took the gold at the Los Angeles International Extra Virgin Olive Oil Competition in March 2013. The oils are judged in three categories—delicate, medium, and robust. Out of hundreds of entries from as far afield as Japan, Turkey, Croatia, Slovenia, Portugal, and the United States, it was an Abruzzese oil made from Gentile di Chieti, Intosso, and Leccino olives that won in the delicate category; an oil from the far northern region around Lake Garda in the medium category; and a Tuscan oil, a blend of several cultivars from the hills south of Florence, in the robust category.

1. We’re not talking extra-virgin here. V. N. Dalmia, whose company is the largest importer, says olive pomace oil is most suited for Indian cuisine because of its neutral taste and high smoke point. The smoke point business is a myth, though widely promulgated. As for pomace oil, most olive oil traditionalists consider it inedible. “But we are here for a very long innings,” one Indian industry executive told a reporter.

2. Formerly the International Olive Oil Council (IOOC) and still sometimes referred to by that designation.

3. The current U.S. fad for flavored olive oils most often involves crushing lemons or oranges or garlic or possibly coffee beans (no, I made that up!) along with the olives. How the oil thus obtained can still be called “virgin” or “extra-virgin,” according to the IOC definition, is, frankly, beyond my comprehension.

4. Recently, Jean-Benoit and Cathérine Hugues have started to export Fruité Noir oil, which they produce in Provence. It is indeed marketed as “virgin” rather than “extra-virgin” because of the peculiar characteristic of fustiness, a major defect for extra-virgin oils. See above for more information.

5. Mirko Sella produces an excellent example of this oil in his Monte Guala monocultivar Grignano, not easy to find but worth looking for.

6. Personal communications and conversations with the late Arlene Wanderman, the IOOC’s chief U.S. spokesperson for many years until her death in 1996.

7. Smart producers nowadays keep their oil stored under a flush of inert nitrogen gas, which protects the oil from the effects of the environment; some even bottle the oil with a plug of nitrogen on top, beneath the lid.

8. The California study appeared in the journal Food Quality and Preference in March 2011. The study of 110 Northern California olive oil consumers was conducted by UC Davis sensory scientists Claudia Delgado and Jean-Xavier Guinard.

9. This is total consumption—in per capita consumption, the United States is at the very bottom of the list, way behind Mediterranean countries, especially Greece, the undisputed world champion at 18 kilos (39.6 pounds) per person annually.

10. The conclusion of the UC Davis report was that 73 percent of the tested oils were defective. Since only 52 samples of 14 brands were tested, that is hardly representative of all imported olive oils. Moreover, the decks were stacked by the organizers since they selected industrial, commodity imported oils and compared them with what were for the most part high-end California oils. Moreover, the report was paid for by the California Olive Oil Council and a few prominent California brands, including California Olive Ranch. This is hardly an argument for objectivity.