A Vertical of Olive Oils, Tasted Like Burgundy
Our cellar desk lined up nine single-estate oils from Tuscany, Crete and Andalusia and tasted them blind, by vintage and terroir, the way a Burgundy tasting is run. What we learned is that olive oil has been sold to us the wrong way round.
Wine is sold by place and year. Olive oil is sold by adjective: extra virgin, cold pressed, first press, words that describe a legal minimum rather than a flavour. Yet oil is at least as sensitive to soil, altitude and harvest date as grapes are, and a fresh oil from a named grove tastes as unlike a supermarket blend as a village Burgundy does from a box wine. We wanted to taste oil the way we taste wine: blind, in flights, with a vocabulary.
The method was borrowed whole from the cellar. Each oil was poured into a blue glass to hide its colour, which tells you nothing about quality and everything about your prejudices, warmed in the hand, and tasted with a sharp intake of air so the bitterness and pepper could be judged separately from the fruit. We tasted three flights of three: Tuscan Frantoio, Cretan Koroneiki and Andalusian Picual, each from two consecutive harvests plus a blend.
What the flights showed
- The harvest date mattered more than the region. Oils from early-picked green olives were bitter, grassy and peppery enough to make two tasters cough, which in oil is the compliment. The same groves picked six weeks later gave rounder, buttery oils with half the character.
- Tuscan Frantoio tasted of artichoke and cut grass; Cretan Koroneiki of green apple and almond; Andalusian Picual of tomato leaf and a long, warming pepper. Told apart blind, all three, by everyone at the table, on the second attempt.
- Every blend finished last in its flight. Not because blends are bad, but because blending sands off exactly the edges that make an oil memorable.
How to buy
Look for a harvest date, not a best-before date, and buy within a year of it. Prefer a named estate to a named country. Store it dark and cool and use it within three months of opening, generously, on food that does not fight it: bread, beans, a tomato, a piece of grilled fish. Treat it like a wine that happens to be poured from a tin, and it will start to taste like one.
