How did that happen?

I have lost count of the number of times that I have been asked “how was it that an English woman like you, brought up on butter, suet and lard came to be an international expert on olive oil?”   Well, it is quite a long story and I thought it might be fun to set it out on my blog in a series of retrospective posts.

 

Back in the late 1980’s I had established myself as a food and wine journalist with the emphasis on wine –  a story for another time.  I was travelling round the wine producing world seeking material for three wine columns for Woman and Home, Woman’s World and the Southern Evening Echo as well as an annual guide to buying reasonably priced wine in the high street.

A growing awareness of olives and olive trees

I gradually became aware that olive trees were as widespread in the wine growing areas of Europe as were vines.  Hospitality at the great wine estates started to include their own extra virgin olive oils to accompany the food as well as the more familiar wines. A small revolution was taking place as these producers realized that their olive oils could cease to be a product purely for family and friends and become a new source of income.

This change was not always welcomed by family members.  Natalia Ravida tells the story of her disappointment when her father gave her the responsibility for the new olive oil business.  “I was much more interested in the wine trade”, she says “I thought of olive oil as an everyday product without much interest”.  However, she embraced the challenge and has built up a premium brand that is known and appreciated worldwide.

As time passed, I began to take more notice of the very different tastes and flavours among the oils I was being offered and followed up with some research just for my own interest.  I had no idea of it being of any particular future value.

Around this time I went to an olive oil tasting hosted by the then EEC and happened to sit next to the guy who had been appointed to organize a series of Olive Oil Information Councils in the non-producing countries. I gave him something of a hard time, comparing what I thought were the inferior regulations surrounding olive oils to those of the Appellation Controllee system for wines and thought no more about it.

The EEC calls

Six months later I received a telephone call from an account director at a leading marketing company that had gained the public relations contract from the Olive Oil Information Council recently set up in the UK.  Would I go in to see them to talk about a proposition they wanted to put to me?  Very intrigued, I agreed to meet them.

In a nutshell the surprising suggestion was that I should retrain as an olive oil expert. The  Olive Oil Information Council needed someone with absolutely no trade connections in the olive oil industry but who would have the in-depth knowledge to liaise with the media, speak at conferences, run masterclasses and the like. As a freelance I would be paid half my daily rate while training and my full rate when fronting the Council’s events. I would also be able to build up my own portfolio of work in the field.

It was not an easy decision.  I had been contemplating furthering my wine career by going for the Master of Wine qualification. However, my husband was not keen on the time that this would take and I was excited about the idea of learning in a new field. So I took the plunge and accepted.

Changing track

In 1992 I embarked on a rigorous training schedule, taking in visits to many of the oil producing regions of Spain, Italy and Greece.  I went to numerous olive groves and production units, meeting producers of all kinds ranging from aging peasant farmers with university educated grandchildren to great land owners and members of European aristocracy, not to mention massive co-operatives with thousands of members and wealthy business men keen to promote and finance the artisan produce of their homelands. Add to that a whole army of university professors, research station directors, machinery producers, agronomists and olive museums.

The high light of one my early visit to Catalonia was Masia Salat, an olive oil museum and theme park near to Lleida and Borges Blancas in the very heart of one of the most important olive growing regions of northern Spain.  It was the brainchild of a local man who was mad about the olive oil of his part of the world and wanted to preserve the old ways for prosterity. There was a collection of ancient olive trees some of which were many hundreds of years old. Scattered alongside the groves was an assortment of early olive presses, some of them almost as old as the trees. There were cylindrical donkey presses with conical grind stones, huge lever presses with counter balancing weights and smaller presses with a central screw rather like a cider press.  In those days the pickers used to de-leaf and wash the harvested olives at home before taking them to the mill to be pressed the next day.  The leaves were fed to any livestock, such as sheep and goats.  The covered museum also housed a wonderful collection of old and new oil and vinegar sets curets from Kiev to Bogota.

Continuous centrifugal production systems take off

The time of my training happened to be a time of great change and development in the olive oil industry. The new much improved systems of continuous centrifugal production were gaining increasing acceptance and the move away from the traditional granite mill stones and hydraulic presses that had dominated the first half of the twentieth century, was well underway.

Early in my training I was invited to attend an “Oleum” or olive oil conference in Florence. This was a great opportunity to listen to leading figures in the industry and to meet fellow journalists.

This was also the first time I really got to know Charles Carey of The Oil Merchant in London.  At the time he was one of the very few importers specializing in olive oil. In the early years he was a real fount of information and remains a great friend.

The UK contingent of buyers and press were invited to a reception hosted by Contessa Bona Fescobaldi at her home in the centre of the city. The Renaissence style Palazzo Frescobaldi, like so many palaces in Italy, is not much to look at from the outside and inside the ground floor, too, is very practical, mainly housing the offices of the Frescobaldi business. But upstairs in the imposing private apartments, on the first floor, things are very different. Beautifully proportioned rooms filled with great art flow from each other down the length of the building yet, rather surprisingly, the atmosphere is still quite homely with a real lived in feel.

Laudemio leads the way

Just two or three years before my visit the Contessa had been instrumental in leading the move of the grand Tuscan wine estates into the commercial production of olive oil.  She was the moving force behind the setting up of the Laudemio range of extra virgin olive oils. Still going strong today, this is essentially an up-market brand operating under the same marketing banner with similar packaging and agreed quality control measures. The individual producer’s names are listed after that of Laudemio. The quality of the oils is high and so is the price. Charles Carey was, and remains, the UK distributor for Frescobaldi Laudemio.

In contrast to the grandeur of the reception at the palazzio was the fascinating street food of Florence.  I was ready for plenty of ice cream and pizza but I did not expect the deliciously aromatic aromas of stews made with tripe, kidneys and sweetbreads, wafting from little trucks parked at street corners.  It was also on this visit that I first came across Gnocchi alla Romagna.  These disc-like gnocchi differ from the more common gnocchi in that they are made with semolina rather than potatoes and have quite a different texture and taste.  They were on the menu at a little restaurant run by the city in a small street running beside the Arno. My husband knew exactly what they were and recommended me to try them but I  foolishly tuned up my nose at them on the basis that I did not like potato gnocchi. Tasting a disc stolen from my husband’s plate soon showed me my mistake but he would not give up any more!

Tasting panels

Also new at the time of my training was the ongoing development of highly specialist organoleptic tasting panels. These were first mooted in 1987 and then included in European legislation in 1991. Set up jointly by the IOOC and the EEC, they were designed to remove subjectivity from the locally based quality check systems that often depended on one or two untrained local ”experts”. The members of the organoleptic panels are trained to detect faults in the oils such as rancidity and also to pick  up contamination of various kinds.  They are also required to ensure that the oils show the perfect taste and aroma required by the extra virgin status regulations.

Rigorous guideline were agreed for methodology and procedure and the panels are regularly tested to ensure that the results from panels in different parts of the olive oil world give virtually the same results for the same oils.

I was lucky enough to train with some of the earliest experts from The International Olive Oil Council and the EEC who were collaborating and agreeing on the detail of the new tasting regime.  I particularly remember the time I spent at the research station in Pescara on the east coast of Italy with Professor Bianchi and his team. This immersion in the taste of the different olive oils fascinated me.  I had not really understood quite what a range of taste and flavour it is possible find in extra virgin olive oil.

My other memories of Pescara include the stunningly simple but delicious uses of extra virgin olive oil in the cooking of the region such as the dish of sea bass I found at a fisherman’s restaurant in the port.  It was baked with very thinly sliced potatoes and zuccini, sprinkled with capers and drowned in local oil. Another favourite was the sumptuously soft  and fragrant pork liver sausages, grilled over an open fire and served with a raw artichoke salad, again dressed with lashings of local olive oil and parsley.

The organoleptic panels do a great job on the quality front, but beyond confirming that the oils meets the requirements for extra virgin status and giving some indication of the intensity of the flavours in the oil, they do not do much to answer the first question that the consumer asks which is “what does it taste like?” There is probably good reason for this.  The panels’  job is to assess quality not to describe the specific flavour characteristics that help to differentiate one oil from another. Afterall, provided the oil is not faulty, the tastes and flavours of an oil are not a matter or right or wrong but of personal preference.

A tasting vocabulary for olive oil

So I decided to set about compiling a vocabulary to describe the tastes and flavours of olive oil and their intensities. I started with the specific thirty word vocabulary already in use by the panels but this did not get me very far as more than twenty of these words described off-flavours and smells and only ten of them referred to neutral or positive attributes. In an attempt to fill the gap I analysed the descriptive words used by leading producers and importers on labels and in shelf notes. I then added a few of my own and came up with a list of sixty descriptions covering the basic style of an oil and its specific flavour characteristics. By 1993 this project was fairly well developed.

Around this time the UK Olive Oil Council unexpectedly asked me to come up with a subject  for a promotional booklet.  I immediately suggested a booklet which would help people to understand and appreciate olive oil better and which would also contribute to answering those all important questions of  “what does it taste like?” and “what shall I do with it?” An integral part of the booklet would be a new vocabulary for describing the very wide range of tastes and flavours to be found in olive oil.  Thus my booklet Taste and Flavour in Olive Oil was born and remains, albeit somewhat up dated, still in print today.