“Bottled in Italy” Doesn’t Mean What You Think

From the notebook

Here is a sentence that has sold an ocean of olive oil: “Bottled in Italy.” It sounds like a pedigree. It is not. It describes where the glass was filled, and nothing about where the olives grew.

For decades, oil pressed in Tunisia, Spain, Greece and Turkey has been shipped in bulk to Italian ports, blended, bottled, and sent on to the world wearing the most valuable three words in the business. Much of it is perfectly decent oil. That is not the point. The point is that the label is built to let you assume something the producer never quite promised.

The fix is on the back of the bottle, in the small print the marketing department wishes you wouldn’t read. European rules require the true origin to be stated there: “origin: EU” or “blend of EU and non-EU oils” is the tell that the front label is theatre. A single, named country — better still, a region or an estate — is what you are actually looking for.

None of this is fraud, exactly. It is simply the gap between what a label says and what you hear. Mind the gap.