Olive oil – price doesn’t always guarantee quality

A neighbour of mine supplies most of the street with a single estate unfiltered olive oil produced in Greece by a friend of hers. It’s a beautiful bright green and tastes fresh and fruity with a real depth of flavour: it blows most commercially available olive oils out of the water! It costs about £8 a 750ml bottle but I buy cheaper olive oils to cook with so it lasts a good while.

I remember when you could buy olive oil in a chemist, but now I live in Spain surrounded by olives,
grapes and almonds, our olive picking season starts usually in December and continues through January, making use of the family gathering at Christmas. I was taken aback at the prices you pay
in England for the oil, our local Co-op Bodega ,where the olive are pressed, charges 12euros for
5 litres and that,s gorgeous “Aceite de Oliva Virgen” a lovely green oil. We use a lot of it and I,ve
even known people who have a lot of oil use it in their cars along with sunflower.

Just like with wine there is a huge amount of snobbery involved with olive oil. The cheapest is by far not necessarily the nastiest, and the most expensive can be a complete waste of money.

If it’s not from Crete I am not interested. We buy loads each time we go there from a friend who grows his olive trees organically, it tastes fabulous. I think it has something to do with the white soil where his trees are and the fact that he uses no insect repellent. The insects (mostly mozzies) are drawn to the water so he does not water his trees in the mozzie season, therefore the trees have developed very deep roots and they survive really well, and the oil is utterly glorious, tons nicer that Iliada, though I will buy that if I have run out of my Cretan oil. After all the originating country for olive trees is Greece and don’t let anybody tell you any different. Yassas!
With reference to Ann Banks comment about buying olive oil from the chemists (and it was dreadfully expensive) this was in the days when even Spaghetti Bolognese had not been heard of! So nobody really knew what its purpose was so we used to use it on a cotton wool pad to loosen the wax in our ears!

I’m amused to find that 13 people, who do not buy olive oil at all, voted in the poll. They may well have read the article it’s based on, too. Why?

Chris, you’re perfectly right, I do have my own business — nothing to do with olive oil I might add.
If none of your friends/relatives have a ‘Makro’ account (sorry, mis-spelt in my comments), ask your window cleaner if he has one, and could oblige.
I have to admit,though, like Julia my true weakness is for Cretan oil. Try Asda’s extra virgin oil from central Crete (PDO Vorios Mylopotamos). These cylindrical 500ml bottles are often generously discounted. While you’re in Asda, an unusual (but not quite as inexpensive) Spanish treat is their extra virgin oil from Catalonia, made from the Arbequina olive variety. I hope this is of help.

Greek olive oil is definately my favourite and I buy mine from Amazon.co.uk who have a massive choice available. I have been buying the Altis brand which is the No.1 Greek brand, Gold Great Taste winner, tastes superb and at under £20 for 4 litres delivered free, I have found to be fantastic value

It’s a shame the Which report didn’t include lab tests for heat-treatment and adulteration. I’d expect their tests of foodstuffs to be as rigorous as those for other “stuff”. “He indoors” went to buy olive oil the other day, and came back with LIDL’s Luccese, which is most definitely NOT “extra virgin”. I opened a bottle today and suffice it to say I’ll be using it on my hair. And in oil lamps the next time we have a power cut. Most unpleasant, though I’ve no reason to suspect it’s adulterated, as well as heat-treated. I did an internet search and, sure enough, this particular oil was slated in an archived report on “Olive Oil Label Fraud in Discount Supermarkets” from Der Feinschmecker Magazine (2005). A pity, too, that EU rules override individual countries’ attempts to legislate for better labelling of olive oil.

What points are mrc65 and Impossible Bird really trying to make?
Surely there are always ‘bad apples(oil merchants)in every barrel? Caveat emptor! — all the more reason for us all to accustom ourselves to the taste of fine extra virgin olive oil.
Back to the subject of the original Which? article. It really is NOT necessary for us to pay silly prices to enjoy good extra virgin oil. It is churlish to assume that spending extra money will protect us from the dubious products of unscrupulous oil merchants. Indeed, this would plainly be playing into the hands of the wily middle-man. Those of us who have tasted (and bought) green olive oil direct from a village press will understand exactly what I mean.

I’m sorry about David S’s apparent puzzlement; I thought all contributors were riffing on the subject of the Which article. I share the good fortune of some of the previous posters, in that I’ve tasted excellent, authentic extra virgin olive oil, having, in the past, been gifted some scrumptious oil from a named small grower. But I seriously doubt whether very many people in the UK have had the opportunity to taste or buy “green olive oil direct from a village press”, and many won’t have the means to visit Crete yearly for the olive harvest, making the authenticity of supermarket-bought oils crucial – that was my essential point.

I’d wager, regretfully, that many would find the taste of good olive oil initially overpowering; a great many people are accustomed to bland food of all sorts, albeit supplemented by artificial “flavour” enhancers. Let us by all means accustom ourselves to the taste of fine extra virgin olive oil; surely a prerequisite is to have a reliable supply of it in the first place. If oils are dishonestly labelled as extra virgin olive – if they are heat-treated and/or adulterated/replaced with oils that never saw an olive – we have no reference point. Even people in countries, such as Spain and Italy, so much better acquainted with olive oil than people in the UK, have been, and continue to be, duped into buying fake or sub-standard oil, occasionally with fatal effects (Spain 1981). Ersatz oil has been sold to and distributed by some of the biggest and best-trusted companies. There’s an awful lot of it out there; the potential profits are enormous; misappropriated EU subsidies are the icing on the cake; regulation is inadequate; enforcement is a joke; and the EU, FDA and the rest of the alphabet soup of relevant authorities apparently regard policing of food adulteration a low priority.

I never implied that we need pay astronomically high prices for such a basic foodstuff; idiotically high prices at one end of the scale, and “pile ’em high and sell ’em cheap” at the other, are elements of what makes oil fakery so profitable. But we need to be realistic about the price of producing and distributing good food, and we’ve grown accustomed to food prices falling in real terms over the last few decades. It’s a matter of regret that food price inflation is as likely to be indicative of the commoditisation of food as it is to be of any improvement in quality. Some cheap oil is part of the “loss leader” culture, which allows large distributers to remain in profit, to the detriment of small producers in particular; however, some of it is simply lower quality than we are led to believe.

Consumers have different perception of what “good” olive oil is and it depends to what you are used to consume. Cheap oils are usually blends made from multiple producers, olive varieties and harvest years. Most big Italian brands blend Italian, Spanish, Greek and Tunisian oils and they sell them as “Italian”. This changes the smell and taste of the final product. It can also cause increase of the acidity. These oils are cheap to produce but they can be extra virgin.
More expensive oils usually come from single estates or local agricultural cooperatives, which are highly regulated. Unfortunately, most of these producers lack of economies of scale. I have discussed the issue with some of them and logistics is the major obstacle to keep the price low. I personally consume a Greek organic olive oil distributed in the UK directly from the producer and it’s called Narrow Leaf. I think it’s great and it comes from a single Greek variety, which is rare. I don’t mind paying something in the region of £10-£12 for a good organic olive oil.

hi all . sorry for my English language but i am from Greece-creta and my city is “chania” …
when i was read all this articles seemed funny , because here in creta we produce the oil own(ourselves).
in creta my family have arable land with oil trees and every year we collect the olives ourselves we go to the olive press ourselves and we have our extra virgin olive oil. here in creta almost all families do the same. this oil is perfect you must taste it the moment that produced in the olive press it is amazing !!!
I can help everyone here who want the specific type of extra virgin oil i can send a certain quantity in some way to you.
I am not a seller or a company i am 28 years old and i am a simple internet user ciao !!!

[Hello Manos, we have edited your comment as we don’t allow personal contact details. Thanks, mods.]

the only olive oil I am used to in Italy is the ones family members process themselves. Everyone has there own olive groves. It’s nice to pick your own olives and send it to the press. Liquid gold is readily available to all farmers in Southern Italy. Back here in the USA we are force to buy what is given to us.

No mention of Greek olive oil.
Athenians will drive south to Kalamata to buy their oil.
The oil and eating olives are exquisite.
It is believed that Italians have been known to buy up stocks of Greek oil to augment there own supplies. But who knows?