The Villa Campestri, high in the hills of Tuscany, is more than a luxurious and historic hotel: It is also the world’s first “olive oil resort.”

This was not what Paolo Pasquale set out to create when he bought the abandoned villa 20 years ago; it’s literally the fruit of what he discovered as he restored his 700-year-old villa.

“Of course, as a Tuscan person, you know olive oil is something special,” Pasquale said. “I knew you used olive oil for everything — according to my grandmother, it cured anything.

“I remember going with my father to buy good olive oil in a farm house. It was like a ritual, going down into a cellar for the new olive oil. I remember the atmosphere.”

The ancient villa he bought in the Mugello Valley of Tuscany had had grapevines, a dairy (the butter of Mugello is famous in Tuscany, he said). It had a bull-breeding station. And it had olive trees, many of which had been destroyed in an unusual freeze in the mid-1980s.

“I began replanting the trees, step-by-step,” Pasquale recalled. “But it was mostly to replace a Tuscan landscape — you can’t think of a Tuscan landscape without olive trees.”

He found himself increasingly intrigued with the product. “I began talking to people who made olive oil,” he said. “I realized they were all very old. There were no young people. It wasn’t good.”

What Pasquale discovered was that, not only was there practically no research being done on olive oil production — imagine, he said, if wine were still being made as it had been 2,000 years ago — but there were few standards for its production. What’s marketed as olive oil — even 100 percent extra virgin olive oil — was largely unregulated, and could, in fact, be a combination of cheap oils, topped off with a little olive oil. Furthermore, little was known about the best way to produce or store olive oil.

Keeping in mind that the olive is a fruit, like a grape; olive oil, like wine, is subject to oxidation and all its harmful effects. Storing olive oil in clear glass bottles, leaving it open and sitting by a stove, exposed to oxygen and heat, rapidly destroys it. As a result what many people identify as the characteristic smell and taste of olive oil is actually rancid.

In short, as consumers were increasingly learning what Tuscans had long known about the benefits of olive oil, an integral ingredient in the healthful Mediterranean diet, few knew what a good olive oil really was.

“I jumped in,” Pasquale said. Although he stresses, “I am not alone in this,” he has taken a leading role, both in Italy and internationally, to promote research, standards, certification of olive oils that meet these standards and, most of all, education of consumers.

A good olive oil?

At his Villa Campestri, Pasquale has transformed the stone cellar into what he calls an “olioteca,” where he provides visitors with an introduction to olive oil.

There he pours samples of the good stuff, that has not only been properly produced but bottled (not in clear glass) and stored. “Olive oil has three enemies,” he explained. “Heat, oil and light.”

And much of what is touted about olive oil is marketing that is largely meaningless. “‘First press, cold press,’ — what does it mean? Olive oil is a fat. How can you have a ‘cold press’? How can you press an olive more than once? It is all part of the confusion surrounding olive oil.”

The proof of what he’s saying, however, comes in what he pours — three oils from three different Tuscan producers, including one from Villa Campestri.

He directs his visitors to warm the oil by cupping their hands around it, and then to smell it, and finally to taste it with an aerating “slurp.”

“Ninety percent is in your nose,” he said — that first fresh, clean, grassy, sometimes floral whiff of the oil. It’s followed by a taste that is not at all greasy (a sign it’s a blend of other oils), but creamy. The finish is the kicker — a jolt of pepper at the back of throat. That’s the pure, 100 percent extra virgin olive oil, and most of the astonished visitors at Pasquale’s olioteca agree it’s nothing they’ve ever tasted before, however many bottles of “olive oil” they’ve bought and used.

“Trust your nose,” Pasquale advises, and then with a smile, “of course when you go into a store you can’t open the bottle and smell it. That’s why you need an olioteca.

And standards. Pasquale has been in the vanguard of efforts to create the TRE E, the Italian organization for certifying olive oil. The International Olive Oil Council and the California Olive Oil Council are also  promoting certification standards. The ultimate push, however, will come from consumers.

Three years ago, Pasquale and his chef from Villa Campestri came to California to participate in the first Olive Oil Symposium at UC Davis. The following year it was held in Siena, Italy. This year, UC Davis hosted the third symposium, joined in its efforts by the Culinary Institute of America. The fourth takes place next May in Florence.

The CIA at Greystone in St. Helena is in the midst of creating a new “flavor bar” that will be opening later this year. In addition to stations for tasting chocolates and cheeses, it will offer its own olioteca; not surprisingly, it will be called the Villa Campestri Olioteca.

“The culture of olive oil is starting now,” Pasquale said. “I am the change man.”