If you say olives to people, they say Greece. If you say olive oil, they say Italy,” declares author, journalist and all round expert Judy Ridgway. “The reason for that is two words: good marketing.”
From the moment us Brits started developing a taste for this green gold of the Mediterranean – as early as the 19th century – the Italians were paving the way for their country in general (and Tuscany in particular) to be considered the place for good olive oil.
The bottles looked expensive; the labels boasted family crests.
“It sounds superficial – and it was superficial, but the Greeks hadn’t really got it together on the packaging front,” says Charles Carey. “Our British connection with Italy and our historic fondness for it as a country meant we have always assumed Italian olive oil was the best.”
The founder and owner of the Oil Merchant in west London, Carey speaks from personal experience. Though today he sources olive oils from across the Mediterranean, when he first embarked upon his quest to bring fine olive oil to London it was to Tuscany he initially headed.
A few years later, with Spanish and French oils in his stock now as well as Italian, he turned to Greece and tried importing to here – “but there just wasn’t the market for it” he recalls. The perception – if there was one at all – was that Greek oil was for cooking with. “Only in the past year or so have people started looking at Greek olive oil with the respect that it deserves.”
Of course, Carey is talking pretty mainstream here: his customers include Waitrose and Harvey Nichols. South of the Thames, Marianna Kolokotroni has been selling organic, single estate Greek olive oil at Borough Market from her shop Oliveology since 2009. Many of her customers have been with her for years.
The main reason the oil of her homeland isn’t known more widely, she says, is because it hasn’t had much going spare until recently. “We were exporting our olive oil to Italy in bulk, where it was mixed with other European oils, bottled and sold as Italian oil. It was the easiest way for our farmers to sell it, so that’s what most people were doing.” With neither the resources nor business acumen of their Italian counterparts, only a handful of Greek olive oil producers (Kolokotroni’s among them) could afford to bottle and sell their own.
Which is a shame, Ridgway explains – because when it comes to quality, Greek olive oil has always been very consistent. “I am right behind the idea of going for Greek olive oil. It doesn’t have the reputation or cache of Italian – but that can mean it offers better value for money,” she continues.
It's so fun and cool and sexy to think about how major corporations would completely dissolve like sugar cubes in hot water if we just didn't go to work
gays be like: i go to the art museum. i look at a painting. i contemplate the irreconcilable loneliness at the very core of my existence. i look at another painting.
This underglazed fritware dish with a delightful radial pattern is from 13th-century Iran.
The rise of fritware drastically changed the ceramic art form in Islamic countries around this time. Fritware was largely made of quartz with small amounts of glass and fine white clay, and Islamic potters used it creatively as a background for a variety of incised, moulded and painted decoration.
Underglazing had also become a popular technique by the turn of the 13th century. Potters initially experimented with the application of a black slip under the glaze (‘silhouette’ ware) until they obtained full control over thin pigments which would not run during the firing, as you can see on this object.
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