Delizia Olive Oil Co. has come up with a marketing strategy that deserves an award for sheer chutzpah: gourmet bulk.

Where premium quality California oil cannot be produced for less than about $24 a gallon wholesale, the Oakland company, a division of Veronica Foods, can offer oil from the Mediterranean at $12 to $15 a gallon.

Insiders in the food industry have tapped into this fact. Delizia's oil, which is rarely found retail and typically comes in huge, 2.6-gallon dispensers, is used by the chefs at the Pasta Shop in Rockridge to make its prepared foods, as well as by such restaurants as Lalime's in Berkeley and the baker Semifreddi's in Emeryville.

"We're very fussy when it comes to something like olive oil," says Sandy Sonnenfelt, who coordinates the Pasta Shop's delicatessen foods, and reports that a lot of people are involved in the choice of this ingredient, which they use both in cooking and as a condiment. "It's a perishable product, and there's a lot of money invested in it. For us, it was very difficult to find bulk oils that weren't defective -- they're often musty or fusty. It was a breath of fresh air to be able to deal with people who know about oil."

Delizia has been a brand since Salvatore Joseph Esposito set up shop in New York's Little Italy in 1924, importing olive oil from Verona. Ten years ago, it was primarily dealing in canned fruit and tomatoes for California canneries,

and olive oil accounted for less than 3 percent of gross sales. Today, the oil makes up 70 percent of its business on sales in excess of $20 million annually, with customers in almost every state.

In 1994, Mike Bradley, Delizia's president, went on a fact-finding mission, looking for good oil at the best possible price. "I thought I was going to find the holy grail of olive oil, and I would nail it down and that would be the end of it," he says.

He toured Spain, Tunisia, Greece and Turkey for the olive harvest, from November through February, and returned with hundreds of bottles, all made within 90 days of each other, and each demanding to be included in the repertoire. As he grew to appreciate the huge variety of regional styles, Bradley came to understand that it would be hard to leave anything out.

In his line of business, shelf life is all-important, and he learned quickly that olive oil is a volatile liquid. "Part of our job as industrial ingredients people is to make sure of that connection between functionality and price," he says. A promising-tasting olive oil, eight months later, isn't always as good as it started out.

As he began to look into it, building up his own expertise by trial and error, he realized that much of the conventional wisdom on the subject didn't hold up.

"I was an anthropology student who ended up in the food business by accident," says Bradley, which may explain why he has had so much fun uncovering the myths associated with olive oil.

First among them is that Italian olive oil beats all comers. People forget, says Bradley, that the first olives were grown in Syria, from where they made their way toward Rome. "Italy," he says, "was a net importer from the get-go."

Much of the olive oil that comes into this country under an Italian label, in bottles with Italian colors, is blended with oils from other producing countries.

Italians are proud of the regional differences in their olive oil; part of the reason the good stuff isn't available is because domestic demand is so high. Bradley doesn't deny that some is great, but he asserts that much of the Italian oil is "very average" and some less than satisfactory. "Let's just say that the good Italian oils that do hold up are overpriced," he says.

In blind tastings, he says, their oils of lesser-known provenance often win out. His point: "Where the oil is produced is far less important than when, how and what it is produced from."

In his zeal to educate American palates, Bradley would have us know that there is no reason to spend an arm and a leg for good olive oil, and that olive oil does not, like wine, improve with age. Few bottles, he maintains, last more than 20 months on the shelf. Once opened, a bottle should be used within a matter of weeks.

Among other little-known facts, he notes that unfiltered olive oil contains more of the beneficial polyphenols than the filtered, or winterized variety, and that "lite" olive oil has just as many calories as extra virgin, but not as many polyphenols.

Under U.S. Department of Agriculture rules, refined olive oil cannot be labeled olive oil, and the label "pure" olive oil came along to get around that. It contains 3 to 10 percent olive oil and 90 percent refined-A, an odorless, tasteless liquid derived from lampante, a lower grade of oil from which the impurities have been removed.

Oil from a given crop of fruit differs depending on when the olives are pressed. Early in the harvest, when the olives are green and full of chlorophyll, the taste is bitter; ripe olives give a rounder, mellower taste and can yield up to 16 percent more oil. Farmers have economic incentives to wait; but they also perk up the late harvest oil by mixing the early with it.

To get the oil he wanted, Bradley decided he would have to toss out the rule book, buy land in the Mediterranean and experiment. He started with North Africa. "We chose Tunisia because it was out of the influence of the established order -- they were outsiders," he says. "It was economically advantageous; and there was no stacked deck of people who were going to tell us the oil was something different than it was."

Ken Stutz, a veteran in the olive oil business and former president of the California Olive Oil Council, has come on board, and the company now offers a "library" of oils, grouped under regional profiles, that Bradley says is unmatched anywhere in the United States.

Delizia co-owns a modern mill near the Tunisian port city Monastir, producing oil in what it labels the "Phoenician" style, after the early traders of this precious commodity. Its Spanish oil, called Castile, is a smooth blend of picual, hoji and arbequina olives.

Its Greco oil comes from olive orchards in the Asopos Valley in the Peloponnesus, so old that its inhabitants consider them pre-Christian. The oil from those ancient trees, some of them apparently 2,500 years old, holds up unusually well, long after other oils have begun to lose their character.

And talking of myths, you may remember that Athena beat out Poseidon when she created the olive tree; the oil was the first portable, semiperishable fat available to the early agricultural societies.

In general, Bradley encourages people to sample and decide for themselves what they like. "People have been buffaloed into believing what they hear and not trusting themselves," he says. "Children know better. The best olive oil tastes most like the ripe fruit that it comes from."