SpiceLines

Dr. Uceda, dapper in a red pullover and pale yellow slacks, looks as if he has just breezed through 18 holes on a suburban golf course. But this genial academic is actually a renowned olive expert who over the last 30 years has conducted meticulously detailed investigations into Spain’s most widely grown fruit. Our three hosts are principals in Aromas de Picual, a project devoted to producing high quality extra virgin oil that extracts every nuance of flavor and aroma from the controversial Picual olive. To this end, they have made innovative changes to every aspect of the production process, from growing and harvesting to pressing and bottling. The pay off for a small company? A slow but steady trickle of awards and a surge of interest, not only in America but also in countries as far flung as Japan and Australia.

Right now, Dr. Uceda is showing us how to inhale.

“First you must warm the oil,” he explains, holding the blue cup in one hand and covering it with the other as he swirls the contents. The tasting room is icy cold, but as we cradle the glasses in our hands, they absorb our body heat and the aroma of the oil blooms.

B and I lift the glass lids off the cups and dive in with our noses. Eyes twinkling, Dr. Uceda gently restrains us: “First inhale from a slight distance so you can capture the aroma in the air. Then put your nose in the cup.”

I hold the cup about 12 inches from my nose and breathe deeply. There’s a delicate herbaceous scent that reminds me of newly mown grass. Then I plunge my nose closer to the oil and a more complex fruity aroma unfolds. I can smell the fruit, but what is it? Apples? Bananas? Whatever it is, it has a refreshingly green scent.

Tasting is a tricky. You don’t slurp and spit. Instead you take a decent sip of oil, tilt your head down and suck air sharply across the roof of your mouth into your throat. As the oil whooshes towards the back of your palate, the volatile aroma molecules meet the openings of the nasal passages and you begin to “taste” what you smell.

That gasping sound you’re making? No, not a death rattle. Just the sound of air and oil making a whirling slurry at the top of your throat.

“Tomato…or tomato leaf…

“ …fresh almonds…

“…would be really good over plain yogurt..”

For me, the oil tastes green and nutty, but with a bite—there’s a touch of Picual’s characteristic bitterness, and a pungency that tickles the back of my throat. Bitterness, incidentally, is considered a positive attribute in olive oil. That mild pungency is due in part to the Picual’s high level of polyphenols—healthy antioxidants that combat heart disease and other ailments.

There are two other oils to taste: Melgarejo Delicatessen, an elegant blend combining extra virgin oils from Melgarejo’s Picual olives and from Hojiblanco, Frantoio and Arbequina olives grown by Dr. Uceda. It is round and sweet on the palate with a clean fresh taste that would be good with fish, or drizzled over a simple salad. For comparison, we also sample an oil that is 100 percent Frantoio. It is buttery, with a hint of bitter almonds and a more persistent bite at the back of the throat.

A couple of years ago B and I took a crash course in The Sensory Evaluation of Olive Oil at UC Davis. In two very long days, about 40 of us—olive oil producers, aspiring growers, writers and dilettantes—swirled, sniffed and slurped upwards of four dozen olive oils from around the world.

We sampled six oils in each mini-session, each in a dark blue glass cup that eliminated color bias. Greenish oils do not necessarily have a grassy aroma, for instance, and golden oils aren’t always buttery. Though we let a little of each trickle down our throats, mainly we spat most of the oil into a cup. We cleared our plates between tastes with bites of green apple and sips of water.

Along the way we scrambled to keep up with the University of California's 15 point olive oil profile, where oils are rated for characteristics such as aroma intensity, bitterness, pungency, fruit intensity, sweetness, astringency, texture, defects such as rancidity, positive attributes, complexity, harmony, finish and overall quality.

Unless you have an exquisitely sensitive palate, good luck. Yes, you may be able to identify “fruitness” in the oil you are tasting. But that’s just the beginning. Is the oil “green” like grass [fresh cut], herbaceous, tasting of artichoke, green apple, green banana, green tea, fig leaf, mint, even spice or straw? Or is it “ripe” as in ripe olives or other ripe fruit such as apples or apricots? Does it taste nutty, floral, buttery, or tropical, or have other aroma characteristics such as eucalyptus? Or is it some combination of the above? And what is the level of intensity? Slight? Moderate? Strong?

It's a confusing world, but the best way to hone your tasting skills is to calibrate your palate to that of an experienced taster. A few years of practice also helps. Oh, and don’t drink or smoke too much, or get sick.

Although some olive oil descriptors may seem esoteric—“cat pee,” for instance, is sometimes used to describe the aroma of poorly handled Picual olives--there is a real benefit to the vocabulary. Professional tasters, says Dr. Uceda, can be located in different parts of the world but since they all use these same flavor references, a taster in Spain and another in California can easily compare notes on, say, an oil’s “complex aroma of grass and artichoke, layered with ripe apricot and almonds.”

Actually I made that that last bit up, but you get the idea.

What really matters, of course, is how an individual olive oil tastes with food. All over Andalucia and in Madrid, we were served delicious, simply prepared dishes in which gorgeous extra virgin olive oil—sometimes green and peppery, sometimes smooth and buttery—was a principal ingredient not only in cooking but also in flavoring. In many restaurants there was a bottle of extra virgin olive oil on the table for drizzling over, say, a salad of roasted red peppers, onions and salty tuna, itself packed in olive oil, or ajo blanco, a quintessential Andalucian cold soup made of almonds, bread, garlic and…olive oil.

Personally, I’m waiting for Dr. Uceda’s forthcoming—and doubtless definitive—book on the topic.

Note: Melgarejo Seleccion was a finalist in the “intense, green fruitiness” category of the 2009 International Extra Virgin Olive Oil Competition. It was one of eighty-five oils from individual producers, including 34 from Spain, competing for the IOC’s Mario Solinas Quality Award. Melgarejo Seleccion is on back order from Corti Brothers in Sacramento and will also be available from Fig and Olive in New York.