Giusi wrote:

I've no idea what it is like in the US, but I just bought 5 litres of
Pugliese oil from the Brindisi hills. The oil must all be cold pressed,
must all be from olives grown in the Brindisi hills, must not be pressed
to produce more than 25% of the weight of the olives. I expect many
cooperatives are that strict. Certainly estate bottled oils would be,
because an estate could be wiped out by labeling bad oil as its own.

Nice to see you posting again, Judith. They make good olive oil all
over Italy, but traditionally, southern oils have always been considered
somewhat inferior. Have you tried any Ligurian oils produced by a good
estate? They still have those three-hundred-year-old oil trees in their
three-thousand-year-old olive groves. And most every olive has to be
harvested manually, as the trees and groves are mostly inaccessible by
machines. Almonds are picked the same way. There is a delightful novel
_La Mennulara_ by Simonetta Agnello Hornby.

Victor