By Curtis Cord
Olive Oil Times Executive Editor
Follow @oliveoilvoice

Australian Olive Association President Paul Miller stopped earlier this month to ask directions in rural Georgia (U.S.). He was to look for a white church, he said in a Twitter update (presumably not sent while driving). What he didn’t say was what he was doing there in the first place, some 16,000 kilometers from his base in Melbourne.

It was just one stop on a long road for the well-known olive oil industry veteran leading to nothing less than a new way for producers, retailers and consumers to determine the real value of extra virgin olive oil.

Miller is worried about the survival of the olive oil industry. “If the pendulum doesn’t swing,” he told Olive Oil Times , “we might as well give up. It’s straining everyone.” Even the giant cooperatives are finding that this “race to the bottom” is not doing anyone any good, he said.

The fix for it all, Miller believes, is illustrated by the current, unlikely climb in prices for Italian olive oil at a time when other European producers are receiving government aid for keeping their product in storage tanks — unable to sell their olive oil for what it cost to produce. The prices for Italian olive oil is soaring on the other hand, Miller said, because it is, in fact, Italian olive oil.

With several recent high-profile prosecutions and Italy’s highly trained forestry service now scrutinizing just about every liter that comes in and goes out of Italy, there’s suddenly a lot less Italian olive oil to go around. So the olive oil that Italy really does produce is commanding a premium.

Miller wants to do the same for extra virgin olive oil itself. “If we can get it so what is genuine extra virgin, is traded as such and what isn’t, isn’t — it would just transform the industry. That’s what we’re doing here, and that’s what the Australian standard is all about.”

It wouldn’t be a new notion except that Miller said that, for the first time, we have the tools to pinpoint the true identity of olive oil — not just when it’s fresh, but at any time during its shelf life. “We’re at the point where we now can accurately describe the life of extra virgin olive knowing the free fatty acids at the beginning and then describing what the life is and will be,” he said, by using a series of tests including the 1,2-diacylglycerol (DAGs) and pyropheophytins (PPP).

Those methods were discussed at last week’s Australian Olive Association annual meeting, a conference with an international attendance and an agenda that reached well beyond Oceania — in fact, all the way to rural Georgia.

Miller described “startlingly complete work” presented at the meeting by Claudia Guillaume from Modern Olives and Rod Mailer from the Australian Oils Research Laboratory based on methods developed by Dr. Christian Gertz and others. Using a series of tests and data from their extensive reasearch, Miller claimed we can now determine with acceptable accuracy the profile of an extra virgin olive oil throughout its useful life. “A retailer armed with the tools can take a bottle off the shelf and check what it should be,” he said.

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This article was last updated December 7, 2011 - 6:54 PM