Olive oil played an integral part: it was no longer just a vital salad ingredient, but an essential for Tuscan bread soups, pasta dishes and fish. The middle classes have found a perfect ingredient, offering nostalgia for their August villa, healthy eating, and a means to be chic all in one.The big retailers’ marketing of olive oil followed hard on the heels of its promotion by TV cooks, specialist London delicatessens and trendsetting London restaurants such as the River Cafe and Orso.Italian food, once written off as little more than dry veal escalope and soggy spaghetti bolognese, became the eating sensation of the late Eighties. Twenty years ago, olive oil was most commonly found in Boots the Chemist – sold to help extract wax from children’s ears – and supermarkets carried a tiny choice.Today all the large supermarkets sell a variety of own brand, extra virgin and specialist oils. “But the shortfall in supply has come as demand has risen all over Europe. The yield of other countries, including Italy, Greece and Tunisia, is not expected to make up for the Spanish shortage.” The result? An inevitable price surge.The rise and rise of olive oil as a British dinner table essential has been the result of an extraordinary mix of fashion trend and health fad. “The price flurry has been caused not just by the overall shortage,” he says, “but also by lateness in this year’s crop, leaving many people scrambling for supplies.”"The overriding factor is the weather in Spain,” explained Siegfried Mielke, publisher of the international journal Oil World. While many specialist food shops sell expensive Italian oils, including some suffused with garlic, basil and rosemary, the bulk of imported oil is Spanish.Last year, Spain exported nearly 6,000 tonnes to the UK.

But with this season’s total Spanish crop estimated around 300,000 tonnes, half last year’s yield, and no European oil lake to make up the shortages, the effect will soon be felt in the consumer’s purse.Richard Frenkel, whose bottling firm Leon Frenkel imports nearly half of Britain’s supplies, says that price rises are inevitable. Buyers for the supermarket chain do not rule out other increases in price, and both Waitrose and Tesco said yesterday that their prices would also rise imminently.
Will it be enough to deter the middle classes from buying their now favourite ingredient? Britain’s consumption of olive oil has soared in the past few years, rising from 13,000 tonnes in 1993 to nearly 17,000 tonnes in 1994. A 500ml bottle will go up from pounds 2.49 to pounds 2.79 while extra virgin olive oil, that essential for the well-dressed salad of rocket and radicchio leaves, will rise from pounds 2.75 to pounds 2.99. Tomorrow that rise will start when Sainsbury’s raises its prices on olive oil by more than 10 per cent.

THE oil crisis has begun. Olive oil, that social lubricant of today’s sophisticated dinner parties, is in short supply. Spain, Britain’s largest provider of the Mediterranean oil, has had its olive harvest wrecked by one of its worst droughts this century, sparking a dramatic rise in prices for all olive oil from the countries of southern Europe. Suppliers are predicting that supermarket prices will rise by as much as 40 per cent this year.