Dear Mike,

If your oil lacks any depth or bite you have an excellent oil for fish
dishes or for making mayonnaise.

Olive oil is to be used as an food ingredient, it isn't a food for
itself, its always used in conjunction with something else.
OO plays several roles in food, it gives flavor, it's a vehicle of
other ingredients flavors, and it gives "texture" and "plasticity” to
the food it's used in. These three roles are always present when we use
it, but on different dishes a role can be more important than another,
for example:

In a salad one is using ingredients that for them self's lack flavor,
so when we ad OO to it we want to use a nice full of flavor OO that
will give some flavor to the ingredients.

In a fish, with it's delicate flavors, one can not use a "strong" OO
because it will "crush" these flavor bouquet of the dish, so it should
be used an oil that, using your words, lacks bite. We want an oil that
will serve mainly as a vehicle to the fish flavors.

On making a mayonnaise, your mainly looking the "plasticity" and
"texture" of the oil, so a delicate oil should be used, if a "strong"
oil is used it will taste only of OO and it will be impossible to eat.

Basically there isn't a perfect olive oil, it depends on the dish your
cooking. And this is what we should transmit to our consumers. This
fashion of "strong" "spicy" OO if taken to extremes can seriously harm
the our sector, because sooner or latter the consumer will get tiered
of these typology of oil and sales will drop drastically and the image
of the product will be seriously compromised on the long term.

Nor should we try and alter our oil by adding ingredients to suit
market, the main strong point of EVOO marketing is that, unlike the
other vegetable oils, its "pure" it hasn't been altered. If we start
tampering with the oil, the consumer will se it has no different from
the other chemically obtained vegetable oils.

Regards,

João Correia