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<pre>I like it. Good romantic stuff. Perfect for the marketing people to
build on and why not?

The reality may be quite different. Vergine or virgin olive oil only
became important in 19th century. Before that all oil was vergine as there
was no treatment for oils. It seems to me highly unlikely that it would be
used to describe the obvious. "Untouched" oil has no significance if all oil
is untouched. The 19th century saw the development of chemistry particularly
organic chemistry and an understanding of acidity in olive oil that could be
changed by treatment.

In the modern age when we are reinventing our romantic and mythological
past we forget that this age of scientific optimism and progress continued
from the 19th century into the 2nd half of the 20th. The use of the word
"refined" indicates that people thought it was better than the original
vergine. This is confirmed by an early Italian food writer at the end of the
19th century who said that the olive oils from Perugia were not much good
and they needed a factory to refine them!!

These virgins must have had a busy time. No off season holidays. When
they were not pressing olives they were lending their name to the virgin
lands of America and Russia as well as virgin forests in Brazil and heaps of
other places.

As far as the origins of the olive are concerned we will probably never
know but there are good guesses and bad ones. The bad ones are areas which
are too cold for modern olive trees to grow in. Agricultural crops have
changed enormously over the last 10,000 years due to human selection but I
cannot see any logic in selecting frost resistance out of olives. If olives
come from some of the freezing places suggested there should still be some
of these super frost resistant ones left there.

Cheers Brian Chatterton.
</pre>
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