Liquid Gold: A Guide to California Olive Oils

Robbie Robbins and his family are gearing up for next month's olive harvest, and this year's batch of extra virgin olive oil.

Put aside any notions of bland, greasy stuff. If this oil is anything like the award-winning output in 2006 from the Robbins Family Farm in San Luis Obispo, Calif., it's not something your kitchen should be without.

It may be surprising to American consumers that such rich, nuanced flavor hails from a Californian, not Italian, olive oil. But, as Robbins points out, "The [domestic] olive oil industry is where the American wine industry was 30 years ago."

You choose your fine wine with care. Why should your olive oil be any different?

Essential Oil

Thought to have been first cultivated around 5000 B.C., the olive is one of the oldest foods known to man.

The ancient world, from Greece to Egypt to the Middle East, prized its oil -- called "liquid gold" by the epic poet Homer -- as an anointment for athletes and royalty, an elixir for good health, a base for cosmetics and a salve for wounds.

Under Roman rule, olive cultivation was spread through the entire Mediterranean basin. Production and trade of olive oil was as essential and influential to the economy then as crude oil is to today's global market (with the Roman Empire in place of OPEC).

On a Mission

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