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You don't have to go that far - there are groves popping up in Napa and Livermore too. The local (Livermore in my case) olive oil I've had fresh off the presses here tastes amazing, it truly woke me up to the degree that we've been mislead.

It made me wonder just how many americans have ever actually tasted real olive oil - because once you have, the fake stuff is immediately obvious.

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My favorite olive oil anecdote. Last year, I was traveling from Venice to Paris on an overnight train and I'd brought along a bottle of wine to share with my cabin-mates. One of them reciprocated by bringing out a can of olive oil that had "just been extracted last week" from his farm in Tuscany. We sampled that oil with a piece of bread torn from his sandwich -- our olive oil purveyor was probably not expecting to conduct a tasting in an overnight train. Would it be politically incorrect to exclaim: mamma mia? :-)

All I can say is that you are right -- it is impossible to taste real olive oil and not know the difference between it and the supermarket stuff.

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