Before El Loco del Aceite existed, Claudio Moretto was already trying to understand why a simple product could say so much. During his training as a sommelier, he studied wine, tea, coffee, chocolate, cigars, cheeses, and olive oil. But olive oil did something different in him. It did not stay as one more subject in the program. It made him want to communicate. Not to show what he knew, but to bring that knowledge closer to people who had lived with olive oil on the table without always knowing its value.
In extra virgin olive oil, Claudio found something close to everyday life. It was not distant or ceremonial. It belonged to bread, to family meals, to children learning by watching, to simple gestures that repeat across generations. During the pandemic, he decided to study it more deeply from La Plata through a course based in Mendoza. The classes, trips, tastings, producers, and olive groves helped him see the olive tree not only as a subject to learn, but as a world he wanted to be part of.
When the time came to present his final project, Claudio could have chosen a more predictable route: an olive mill, a product line, a business idea. But none of that moved him. What interested him was communication. He wanted to explain extra virgin olive oil without making it cold, technical, or reserved for specialists. He wanted people to understand it in a simple way, to lose the distance, to see it again as something useful, generous, and present in daily life. That idea became El Loco del Aceite.
The name sounds playful, but the work behind it is serious. Claudio started speaking to a camera even though it was not natural for him at the beginning. He trained, pushed through the discomfort, and turned an academic project into something real. Not because he needed another business, but because he felt there was something worth sharing. Since then, he has visited producers, walked through olive groves, recorded conversations, shared what he learns, and insisted on one idea: extra virgin olive oil should not belong only to experts. It can belong to anyone.
That is where Claudio’s story becomes personal. He does not speak from a script. He speaks from the place of someone who found new meaning in a product he once thought he simply had to study. His granddaughter appears in that world too, as a reminder that what he shares is not only information. It is something he wants to pass on. A way of teaching care, habit, and connection through something as simple as olive oil on bread.
The recognitions came later: being an international jury member, receiving the distinction of Guardián de los Olivos, being invited to give seminars. But those titles do not explain him completely. A clearer image is this: after receiving his first honorarium from a seminar linked to this passion, he chose to donate it to his neighborhood club. That gesture says more than any slogan. El Loco del Aceite is Claudio finding a way to use what he knows for others, to connect study with service, and to remind people that sometimes a bottle on the table carries more history, care, and value than we were taught to see.
For Claudio, olive oil stopped being a subject and became a mission. Not a loud one, not a commercial one, but a personal one. The kind that begins with curiosity, grows with study, and ends up returning to the people around you.
