The first time I truly tasted olive oil as it’s meant to be tasted was a few years ago at the Fig & Olive in New York City. I was having a late lunch with my now husband and with the bread our waiter brought a trio of olive oils. I wondered: Why do we need three olive oils?

I proceeded to take a piece of bread and dip in in the first oil — smooth and creamy. I took another piece and dipped it in the second oil — freshly cut grass! I had idea an olive oil could be so different from one to the next.

Since that meal at the Fig & Olive, I’m ashamed to admit that until a recent Friday afternoon the attention I’ve paid to olive oil has been very little. Sure, I use the olive oil I buy at the grocery store in cooking, grilling and salad dressings, but I had given no weight to how the olive oil actually tastes.

“Smell this,” says Jeff Conarko, seconds after I walk into Con’ Olio, his olive oil and vinegar shop located in the Arboretum. He waves a bottle of old olive oil pressed two weeks ago in California under my nose — fresh and grassy.

From the two-year-old Con’ Olio, Conarko, who discovered that real olive oil is lively with flavor on travels through Italy, France and Spain, sells fresh olive oil — none of his oils are more than six months old — from around the world.

“When my wife and I had olive oil [in Europe], we were like, ‘Oh, my gosh, there is so much flavor!‘ says Conarko. “I wondered why it is so different from the oil we buy at home that says on the bottle that it’s from Italy and costs $40, but it doesn’t take like this. I had to find out why.’”

He started talking to local olive growers in Europe and found out that they only eat olive oil when it’s fresh and in season. At the end of the season, the remaining oil is either thrown out or sold to Americans, Conarko says.

“After six months, the oil starts breaking down chemically,” he says.” It loses its flavor, its aroma and the antioxidants inside the polyphenols that make it healthy for you — it all ages out. After a year, it’s almost totally gone and you can tell by smelling it and by tasting it. It becomes odorless, it becomes tasteless. And after another year it becomes rancid.”

In America, the average age of olive oil on grocery store shelves is one to two years old, Conarko says. Hardly fresh, and on its way to rancid.

Olives are annual plants, they ripen once a year. In the northern hemisphere, the olives are harvested and pressed in December; in the southern hemisphere, May. If you look around Con’ Olio, you will see oils from Argentina and Australia — both in the southern hemisphere. A trick learned from the Italians is to import olive oil from olive-growing regions in the southern hemisphere when it’s not olive season in the north.

Conarko expects his first shipment for the northern hemisphere season next week. The two-week-old Arbosana olive oil from California is the first of the season. It is an intense, chartreuse-colored oil that is peppery, grassy and catches in the back of the throat.

“All olive oils should get you in the back of the throat because that is the polyphenol [anti-oxidant] content,” Conarko says.

Olive oils range from mild to intense in flavor. All olives start out green and with degrees of ripeness they change in color from green to yellow to purple and finally black. Mild olive oils are made with riper olives (black olives) and tend to be creamy and buttery. Olive oil, unlike balsamic vinegar, gets more acidic as it ages. The increased acidity washes out the peppery and green flavors found in more intense olive oils made with younger olives.

The extra-virgin classification for an olive oil is a measure of acidity. An extra-virgin olive oil must have less than 0.8 percent acidity. And since much of the olive oil found here in the U.S. is a year or two old, it isn’t actually extra-virgin.

“You can really taste the difference and people should buy olive oil because of taste not what it says on the bottle,” says Conarko, who teaches olive oil appreciation and tasting classes at the Whole Foods Culinary Center and in the special needs dietary program and Seton Hospital.

And the only way to notice the difference between a true, high-quality and fresh olive oil and an inferior product is to taste, taste, taste. Tasting the difference between the two is the first step. And once you go fresh, you never go back, Conarko says.

Conarko’s favorite way to enjoy olive oil is dipping bread into it. From his Syrian brother-in-law he learned to use it on sandwiches. He recommends brisket on a baguette drizzled with olive oil.

So, I leave you with Conarko’s three essential tips when it comes to quality and tasty olive oil:

• “Fresh, fresh, fresh. It’s got to be fresh.” - The date the olives were crushed or harvested needs to be on the bottle. The international standard is a “best by” date, which is completely subjective, says Conarko. The “best buy” date is two years from when the olive oil was bottled , which is not an indication of freshness. An oil could sit in a vat for months or years before it is bottled.
• “Use it for everything.” - Don’t think that you have an olive oil and can’t cook with it. A quality oil really can be used for everything -- grilling, frying, sauteing, etc. Mild olive oils tend to be better for baking or for frying, because you don’t want to add too much flavor. But the big, green, grassy, peppery oils can provide flavor profiles essential to Italian and Middle Eastern cooking.
• Store olive oils in a dark, air-tight bottle away from heat and light.

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For more olive oil education, Con Olio is offering an Olive Oil 101 class on Jan. 26 from 7 - 8 p.m. Cost is $19.99 per person. Also, to learn more about the scandalous olive oil industry, check out Marene Gustin's article here.