Don Martinich > wrote:

>Oils pressed from less ripe olives tend to have stronger aromas and
>flavors. Also aging the oil makes some difference. I don't know about
>Greece but Italy , Spain, and France all produced oils with a wide range
>of flavors/aromas depending on all the usual suspects: variety,
>ripeness, microclimate, cultural practices and so on. From a marketing
>angle, I think the producers/packers of high priced oils like to use the
>"greener" oils so their customers can talk about their favorite oils
>using a lot of wacky descriptors just like a bunch of yuppie wine snobs.
>How else can you charge 30 bucks for 8 ounces of cooking oil? (I guess
>packaging it in perfume bottle helps.)

$30 per half liter is about what I find I have to pay if I
want an oil that is notably better than < $10/l TJ's, Kirkland, etc.

The difference may not be all that noticeable to many people,
and one could easily get by without it, but it's there.

Recently, the oils in that price range that I've used are all
Sicilian, but in the past there was at least one really good
Ligurian.


S.