following up on Allans post re Peters, I applaud their stocking dated oils! I get really annoyed with (1) the lack of vintage/"best before" date labelling for most olive oil here, especially expensive Extra-virgin oils and (2) the failure of so-called fancy food vendors to take the old EV oils off their shelves or mark them down. As you know, unlike wine, for olive oil new is best (for fine flavor, tho the cooking quality remains fine for some time) so Im always trolling for the most recent vintage, and now, for the new oil from the 99/00 vintage. But delicious fresh oil can be hard to find here. I have good luck with the relatively-inexpensive lebanese oils in brooklyn and greek oils in astoria, where the turnover is huge and the staff knowlegeable, but try to find high-quality oil you can identify as new-crop italian, spanish or french! To give 3 recent examples, most of the fancy oils at ABC Food Hall (which I generally support) were oldish (2-3 yrs); the Campagna oils (and all the oils I could see on sale) were similarly oldish at Campagna's 21st st. takeout store, and one bottle of Lerida oil at my favorite Eagle Provisions in Brooklyn (admittedly not a high volume olive oil outlet) was from the 1994 vintage. Buyer beware, and lets see if we can get our purveyers to take more care with their stock. And I'd like to hear recommendations of other reliable sources.
4th of July