How do you choose your olive oil? Do you reach for the cheapest? Or the most enticing green? Maybe the one with the prettiest, most ‘authentic’ Italian label? Or do you freight in supplies direct from your contact in Tuscany?
For me, it depends on how flush I’m feeling, where I’m shopping or maybe what I’m planning to cook. It’s all a bit random. That’s why struggling artisan olive oil producers in Europe want to make it easier for people like me to make wiser and more considered choices, and in the process, buy more of the lovely stuff.
Producers in Spain, Italy and Greece have never had it so tough. Not only are they grappling with economic meltdown, but they now face an oil crisis. An olive oil crisis, that is. The price producers receive for their olive oil has plunged to a glut-induced 10-year-low thanks to a bumper olive crop in Spain, and a fall in demand from cash-strapped consumers. Europe has a great big olive oil lake.
The solution? Among a number of suggestions put forward by olive oil bigwigs in the EC is a proposal for a new classification of olive oil so that consumers can buy oil specific to their needs, “a different category so as to bring out more the specific qualities of the different oils.” It’s not clear how this will work, but EC Agriculture Commissioner Dacian Ciolos believes that as it stands, classifications are broad and there might be scope to create more grades within these categories to cover olive oil blends, olive oil residues and even specific qualities like fruitiness or strength of flavour. Another suggestion to woo more customers is a new labelling provision to require best-by dates to be printed on bottles.
But some producers and industry commentators believe the creation of a new classification would be fiddling around the edges of the main problem: olive oil fraud and the need for greater transparency about what’s actually inside the bottles we buy.
Police investigators in Italy recently discovered that four out of five bottles of ‘Italian’ olive oil are being adulterated with lower quality oil (and not necessarily olive oil) from other Mediterranean countries. According to olive oil producer Jason Gibb - who set up Nudo with partner Cathy Rodgers in 2005 after buying and restoring an olive grove in Italy’s Le Marche - this means if you’re buying the cheapest ‘Italian olive oil’, chances are you’re not buying olive oil at oil. Despite the claims on the label.
He points to research by investigative journalist Tom Mueller, author of Extra Virginity: the sublime and scandalous world of olive oil, which says that skilled fraudsters are flooding the market with cheap and fake ‘virgin olive oil’ and undercutting honest producers.
“Personally I don’t think that creating new categories will help much, ” Gibb says. “There is already a lot of confusion surrounding the 5 or so categories there are already. What the EU should be doing is enforcing the current legislation, testing a much larger number of oils being sold, and then prosecuting the fraudsters.”
What he would really like to see is the EU enforcing new regulations that require all virgin and extra virgin olive oil labels to state the country of origin. It doesn’t alway happen.
Against this backdrop, the Italian Chamber of Commerce recently organised a visit to the UK of winners of the prestigious Ercole Olivaro, aptly described by fellow food blogger Jessica Johnson as the Olive Oil Olympics for Italian producers.
To showcase these glorious oils to their best advantage, the garrulous Giancarlo Caldesi ran an Italian cookery masterclass for food writers using six of the twelve winning oils from the 2012 Ercole Olivaro awards.
Giancarlo reckons UK consumers need to learn a thing or two about using good olive oil. First: forget the myth that good quality olive oil is wasted in cooking. Second: buy olive oil that you can taste first - colour has nothing to do with quality.
“You buy a bottle of wine and it lasts two minutes,” Giancarlo says. “You buy a bottle of olive oil and it lasts for a few weeks, but in England we won’t spend as much on it as the wine. Why?”
Despite the obvious answer to that question - cost - it’s easy to get swept up in his mantra when surrounded by some of the finest olive oil produced in Italy. Grassy, sweet and wonderfully perfumed, these artisan oils were delicious enough to sip straight from a glass. Incomparable to the industrially-produced cheap stuff that most have us have squirrelled away in a cupboard somewhere for emergencies.
Here are some of the dishes we made with some truly amazing oils during our morning with Giancarlo. Many thanks to fabulous Indian cook Sheba Promod who shared her images when my memory stick
self-destructed.
These simple tomato and garlic bruschetta were elevated to something truly gorgeous with some Primo DOP Iblei extra virgin olive oil from Sicily.
Possibly my favourite dish of the day: insalata bianca made with chicory, apples and a slosh of Cetrone Intenso Lazio
Ragu all Bolognese made with Colline di Romagna - proof that it is worthwhile cooking with fabulous oils.
Read more about the realities and cost of olive oil production on Jason Gibb’s lovely blog. For tips on how to choose your olive oil - and I’m now determined to choose more wisely - click here.
Fascinating piece Sue. Quite romantically, I have bought my olive oil from a small cooperative in the town of Monda in Andalucia for the past two years or so. Though, it’s not quite as romantic as it initially sounds, my parents drive back once a year and when doing so, fill the boot with huge plastic jerry cans of the stuff. It’s amazing stuff, but i’m down to my last litre at time of writing. I think that when you consciously try different olive oils, you can spot the quality a mile off. It does cost a few quid for good stuff - unless you have parents that peddle the stuff across international borders - but out of habit, I think a lot of consumers hardly ever actually taste their olive oil on its own for the individual flavours.