How Olive Oil Is Judged: The NYIOOC, Flos Olei, the Blue Tasting Glass and What a Medal Actually Tells You
Most foods are judged by opinion. Olive oil is judged by a method, and the method is old enough, standardized enough and strange enough to be worth knowing before you trust a medal. A trained taster pours the oil into a small glass that is blue, so that she cannot see whether it is green or gold, covers it, warms it in her cupped hands for a minute, uncovers it, inhales, takes a small mouthful and slurps air across it with a sound that would get her thrown out of a restaurant, and then scores what she found against a fixed vocabulary of three virtues and seven faults. Every serious competition and every regulatory panel uses a version of that ritual. This guide explains it, compares the two competitions whose names appear most on bottles, and says what a medal can and cannot tell you. Our mill piece covers how the oil got into the glass.
The blue glass
Color is the first thing an untrained taster judges and it means almost nothing; a deep green oil can be a great one or a mediocre early pick, a gold one can be a buttery Ligurian or a tired supermarket blend. So the official tasting glass, defined by the International Olive Council, is cobalt blue, tulip-shaped to concentrate the aroma, and covered with a watch glass until the moment of tasting. Warming it in the hands brings the oil to about body temperature, where the volatile aromas release. The slurp, the strippaggio in Italian, sprays the oil across the palate and pulls air through it, which is how the pungency at the back of the throat is measured.
Three positives, seven defects
The scoring vocabulary is fixed. The positive attributes are three: fruitiness, the aroma and flavor of fresh olives, which can be green or ripe; bitterness, on the tongue, from the polyphenols; and pungency, the peppery catch in the throat that makes a taster cough, also from polyphenols, and a sign of a fresh, healthy oil rather than a fault. A balanced oil has all three in proportion to its style.
The defects are a longer list and any one of them, at a detectable level, means the oil is not extra virgin whatever the label says. The main ones: fusty, from olives that fermented in a pile before milling; musty, from mold on olives stored damp; winey or vinegary, from fermentation to alcohol and acetic acid; muddy sediment, from oil left on its lees; metallic, from contact with metal; rancid, from oxidation, the fault of old or badly stored oil; and heated or burnt, from too much heat in the malaxer. The mill piece explains where each comes from. A trained panel can identify them at concentrations a shopper would never notice, which is why the legal definition of extra virgin depends on a panel, not just on chemistry.
The NYIOOC
The New York International Olive Oil Competition, held every spring since 2013, is the largest olive oil competition in the world, with entries in the thousands from dozens of countries. Producers pay to enter; panels of trained international judges taste blind by the method above; oils are grouped by intensity, delicate, medium or robust, so that a gentle Ligurian is not scored against a fierce Tuscan; and medals are awarded on an absolute scale, gold and silver, with a best-in-class for the highest scorers, rather than ranked against one another. That means many oils can win gold in a year, and a NYIOOC gold tells you an oil passed a demanding blind panel with no defects and strong positives, not that it beat every other oil. The results are published with the producer, the cultivar and the intensity, which is useful information in its own right.
Flos Olei
Flos Olei is an annual guide rather than a competition, published in Italy by the taster Marco Oreggia since 2010, which selects and scores the world's best extra virgin oils on a hundred-point scale after tasting and after visiting or vetting the producers. It is closer to a wine guide than to a medal show: a smaller, curated list, with the top producers of each country, a book you buy, and scores in the nineties for the best. Where the NYIOOC is broad and inclusive, Flos Olei is narrow and editorial, and a producer that appears in both with high marks has been checked two different ways.
What a medal tells you
A recent gold from a blind competition tells you the oil was defect-free, fresh, well made and true to its style in the spring after its harvest. It does not tell you which style you will like, whether the bottle in front of you has been stored well since, or whether it is this year's oil; olive oil is a fresh product that declines through the year, as our buying guide insists, and a medal from a prior harvest is a statement about a different oil in the same bottle. Read the harvest date beside the medal, and treat the medal as what our Great Taste guide calls it: evidence, not proof. An oil with no medals from a producer who owns the mill and picks early is often the better bottle; many of the best never enter.
Tasting at home
You can do a version of the ritual with a small cup and a hand over it. Warm it, smell for grass, tomato leaf, artichoke, apple or nut, sip and slurp air, and count the cough. Bitter and peppery are good; flat, greasy or waxy are the faults you can catch without training. Taste two oils side by side, a delicate and a robust, and the vocabulary makes itself. The oils at 263 Josephine Street in Cherry Creek, Denver, ship nationwide from theambrosianpantry.com.
