The current issue has a very informative article on fraud in Italian olive oil.
One conclusion:
In Puglia, which produces about forty per cent of Italy’s olives, growers have been in a near-constant state of crisis for more than a decade. “Thousands of olive-oil producers are victims of this ‘drugged’ market,” Antonio Barile, the president of the Puglia chapter of a major farmers’ union, told me, referring to illegal importations of seed oils and cheap olive oil from outside the E.U., which undercut local farmers. Instead of supporting small growers who make distinctive, premium oils, the Italian government has consistently encouraged quan-tity over quality, to the benefit of large companies that sell bulk oil. It has not implemented a national plan for oil production, has employed a byzantine system for distributing agricultural subsidies, and has often failed to enforce Italian laws and E.U. regulations intended to prevent fraud. The government has been so lax in pursuing some oil crimes that it can seem complicit. In 2000, the European Court of Auditors reported that Italy was responsible for eighty-seven per cent of misappropriated E.U. subsidies to olive-oil bottlers in the preceding fifteen years, and that the government had recovered only a fraction of the money.
There is a great deal more on the subject, and a totally unrepentant former dealer, with an interesting spin on the subject:
Marseglia estimated that ninety per cent of oil sold in Italy as extra-virgin isn’t of premium grade. “It’s anything but extra-virgin, the oil we have here,” he said. He did not seem to think that this was a problem. “First of all, let’s give people good oil,” he said. “Then the excellent—all the extraordinary stuff at forty or fifty euros a kilo, which a few idiots in the world can afford—we’ll think about that later, no?” He told me that his family uses ordinary oil: “For us, the concept of ‘good’ is enough. We want to be average folks.”
Over lunch in the Casa Olearia canteen, Marseglia showed me what he meant by good oil. Techniques like strippaggio are “all hot air,” he said. “Tasting a plate of pasta is easy. Tasting a glass of wine is easy. Tasting a piece of fruit is easy. Tasting oil is the same. It has to have the same pleasurable tastes. If it has an unpleasant one, it’s not good—that’s pretty simple. They say you need a lot of knowledge to understand it, because they want to make the subject seem more intellectual.”
He reached across the table for a bottle of Giusto, his company’s supermarket label, unscrewed the cap, and pointed it at me. “Smell this. Does it smell good, or stink?”
It smelled good: a tart, intensely green fragrance that I’d come to associate with coratina, a popular olive cultivar in Puglia.
Marseglia brought the bottle to his lips and tipped in two big glugs. “So you put it in your mouth, right?” he said thickly, through the oil. “Either it’s disgusting, and you spit it in somebody’s face, or it’s good.” The sign of a good oil, he went on, is the bocca bella (“pretty mouth”), the pleasant taste and sensation that remains in the mouth after you’ve swallowed the oil.
Marseglia passed me the bottle. “Now you taste it, without doing what those other guys do,” he said. “Pretend you’re eating a candy, something good. Then we’ll see how it leaves your mouth.” He watched my face intently as I swallowed the oil, then nodded, satisfied. “Tasting things is simple,” he said.
The article has a fascinating history of how the ancient Romans tried to prevent fraud (concluding that current regulations are much less effective than they were 2000 years ago) and a good description of tasting olive oil.
A very good article, available for awhile, at least, free online.
Slippery Business; the Trade in Adulterated Olive Oil
