Real olive oil tastes like grass and pepper and green almond. It catches at the back of your throat. It is bright, almost combative, nothing like the bland yellow liquid most supermarkets sell. To understand the difference, you need to be in Tuscany in November, when the harvest is on.
Drive into Chianti and follow the brown signs marked "frantoio." A frantoio is a mill where olives are crushed — sometimes still by huge granite wheels, more often now by stainless-steel centrifuges. The good ones open their doors during harvest and let you taste the oil straight off the press, still cloudy, still warm.
I spent a morning at Frantoio Pruneti in Greve in Chianti, a family operation now in its fourth generation. The olives — Frantoio, Moraiolo, and Leccino varieties — had been picked that dawn, by hand, into nets laid under the trees. By midday they were in the mill. "From tree to oil in six hours," Paolo Pruneti told me. "Anything longer and you lose the green."
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