One of these days I’ll have to put in the research to generate a worthy column about local olive oil. Either that or I can wait for Clare Hasler to work a little magic.

“I’m trying to organize a honey center,” she explained to me last weekend. Hasler is the executive director of the Robert Mondavi Institute for Wine and Food Science on the UC Davis campus. The institute is composed of those new buildings close to Interstate 80, right by the better-known performing arts center.

Given the success of the institute thus far — it sits on what was an alfalfa field as recently as 2004 — I think the honey center can’t be far off.

Not long ago, the institute organized the UC Davis Olive Center, which is headed by Dan Flynn. I had dinner with Flynn some time ago. It was a random thing at a dinner event. Flynn had acquired an olive orchard north of Sacramento, and it had become his passion, the way goat cheese, bees and chickens can capture a person’s heart. He was spending inordinate amounts of time driving up there from his paycheck job in Sacramento.

Olive oil from these parts is about where California wine was some decades back. High-quality extra-virgin olive oil is certainly more abundant, and there have been noteworthy improvements in how it is made. However, it doesn’t, in my view, have enough cachet nationally (or locally). It should.

“Olive oil degrades over time,” says Hasler, who presides over the sensory perception side of the institute. Seventy percent of the olive oil from Europe, based on their testing, falls short of being the extra-virgin olive oil on the label. (The institute tested olive oil from supermarket shelves.)

Sometimes it’s from the fraudulent introduction of other, lesser oils during processing. But often it’s the simple fact that the foreign olive oil has gotten old and endured the hardships of shipping, rendering it fusty or rancid, or lacking in the fruity or aromatic qualities that mark extra-virgin olive oil.

Several years ago I joined an olive oil tasting with Darrell Corti, a Sacramentan who “opened my eyes to products from around the world,” renowned chef Alice Waters once told the Los Angeles Times. We tasted a variety of olive oils from dark blue glasses, so color wouldn’t influence our sensory experience. I came to appreciate how good we have it here, where freshness is an advantage.

All of this is a prelude to encouraging you to try extra-virgin olive oils from Northern California, and especially from within an hour’s drive of Davis. The best olive oil I can remember came from a brace of very mature olive trees in Winters. Crushed one day, on my salad two days later. That’s an experience.

Back at the Robert Mondavi Institute for Wine and Food Science, I wandered next to the beer brewery, a world-class facility. Davis has long had a beer-brewing program. Two students of mine in the MBA program on campus had a business plan for what would have been the first brewpub in Davis, a novel idea at a time when there only a few brewpubs around the country. It looked like a pure moneymaker for downtown Davis, but they never got it going. Sudwerk opened soon after, proving what could have been.

Now that we have this new, larger facility, will we see local beer sold to the public from campus, the way we can buy meat two days a week from students learning animal husbandry?

“There are no sales or plans to,” says Charlie Bamforth, a legendary figure who’s been teaching brewing for a third of a century. Too many rules, too much fuss.

While it seems we won’t have any local beer passing from the campus to your hands, he surprised me when he explained how nutritious beer is. Of course, that aspect is not exactly marketed to Americans. “Beer is marketed to men behaving badly,” says Bamforth, which is another thing entirely.

August Busch III gave the beer brewery $5 million to help it become what it is today, but Busch Beer and St. Louis aren’t where Bamforth’s students go.

“They head out to Dog’s Rear End Brewery (fictional) in South Dakota,” where they can make big, dark beers that hide any mistakes, he says. Making the light-tasting mass-marketed beer is apparently a much harder thing, and then there’s that cachet thing again.

Bamforth and Roger Boulton, a chemical engineer who’s a noted authority on winemaking, jointly blew away any lingering belief I had in red wine as a special elixir for heart health. It’s all about the ethanol — in other words, the alcohol. It’s good for you in moderation.

The new facility for winemaking has 150 fermenters, far and away the most in any wine school anywhere on Earth, Boulton says. A donation by T.J. Rodgers, who founded Cypress Semiconductor in Silicon Valley, made that happen.

Rodgers became enamored with winemaking while he was the CEO. I can testify to that because he had agreed to be the keynote speaker at a technology conference my newspaper, The Sacramento Business Journal, was organizing at the Convention Center. The morning of the event, we checked with his assistant about whether we could expect Rodgers on time. She said he was at his vineyards, and she didn’t know. Oh great. But he showed, and we knew to gift him with an expensive magnum of (sorry) French Bordeaux for his troubles.

Does the university have any locally produced vintage wine stashed away in its funky wine cellar on another part of campus? Might it come up for sale?

It’s a curious wine dungeon, once photographed by Ansel Adams himself. None of that wine, produced in prior decades and left to gather dust — I can attest to the dust, from a visit there — has been allowed into the pristine environment of the new platinum LEED-certified wine-making facility.

“Most of it’s not drinkable,” Boulton said.

Shucks. However, Boulton and company might think about bottling university vinegar. I’m sure Whole Foods would carry it, as they’ll be seeking local connections.

— Dan Kennedy, a Davis resident, has a long history with the bounty of gardens and small farms. Reach him at [email protected]

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