[bhangi]

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.