Hanging just a few feet from California’s famous Cabernet, olives now have some winegrowers seeing new green. With the massive popularity of wine in recent years, a ton of new plantings have in some cases flooded the market with wine grapes, thus driving down profit, so some growers and wineries are diversifying with a match made..well in the med.

Longtime Lodi, California farmer Mike Manna from Acampo AG says, “We’re still only a dot on the map of the olives world-wide.”

But with U.S. consumption surging and only about 1% olive oil actually produced in the United States, some farmers are planting what could be the golden state’s next cash crop. “Some of the people who have older grape vines are pulling them out, even cherry orchards, walnut orchards, and then also using just bare land that’s not being used…they are planting olive orchards,” says Manna.

Having travelled the globe for Fox, I can see the hillsides of Tuscany and the terraces of Israel, but these orchards while beautiful, look more like vines, with the trees planted and then strung on trellises like winegrapes. A new growing technique for olives that allows farmers to use mechanical pickers and drip irrigation. That means better production and ultimately better oil, using much less water than so many other crops.

Brady Whitloe the president of Claifornia’s Corto Olives says, “We do produce a very high quality olive oil that most consumers have never tasted before because that’s not what get’s sent to the United States from Europe.”

In fact recent studies have shown much of the olive oil coming from Europe isn’t even close to what’s labeled. A University of California, Davis study even found that 69 percent of imported oils marketed as extra-virgin…weren’t. Olive growers here say that means there’s no better time to mill consumers looking for a new taste. Many here in California’s Central Valley contend that for years Europe and the Middle East have dumped the bad stuff on us, because American consumers wouldn’t know any better. There’s even been a massive lawsuit filed in Los Angeles last week that contends foreign suppliers were misleading a number of American chef’s and restaurants.

“Our goal is to do with California olive oil what winegrape growers did with California wine 30 years ago,” Says Whitloe. As someone who grew up in wine country, I can tell you that the transformation in the many California wine countries has been dramatic in recent years with the growing popularity of wine. To follow that lead…seems like the obvious and right avenue.

Overall, American consumers are soaked more than 700 million dollars worth of the Mediterranean crop last year and that is expected to grow even more this year, so the opportunity to make a move like American Wines a generation ago, means money may truly be growing from trees in California.