Learning About Olive Oil Is as Easy as Sniff, Sip, Snort and Spit

Fabio Chiappini cradles the small porcelain cup in his hand. In goes his nose for a deep draft. Then come a small sip, a masticating movement of the jaw, two sharp snorts and a delicate expectoration.

“We can’t say this oil has refinement,” he says. “It’s heavy, with a strong artichoke flavor, but not much vegetal quality.” Good for bruschetta or boiled beans, “but if we put it on fish, it will hide the taste.”

Now it’s the students’ turn--sniff, sip, snort and spit. We check our score sheet--clear olive taste, excellent artichoke quality, very good piquancy, only modest vegetal quality, an almond aftertaste.

All in all, not perfect, but a decent olive oil.

Adopting the language of sommeliers and the marketing skills of Madison Avenue, the olive oil world is using tasting courses and rating systems to try to raise consciousness about extra virgin olive oil--the rich, pungent, flavorful oil that has the highest price tag.

The courses are fascinating tutorials about a liquid firmly embedded in Western culture and palates. Many are open to travelers, with the benefit, in Italy at least, of beautiful and evocative surroundings.

One such place is Loro Ciuffenna, a tiny town between Arezzo and Florence in Tuscany.

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Shielded from the northern winds by the Pratomagno Mountains, Loro sits on a ridge above the Ciuffenna Tiver, which carves its way through a gorge below.

The countryside ripples with the silvery leaves of olive trees, their gnarled trunks gripping the earth.

The town is the home of a new museum to painter and sculptor Venturino Venturi, who still lives nearby. It’s also a center for hiking and nature walks.

Nearby is the headquarters of the International Movement for Olive Oil Culture (Movimento Internazionale per la Cultura dell’Olio da Olive, or MICO), which runs courses in City Hall.

Its president, local oil producer Giuseppe Grappolini, also teaches courses at food fairs in the United States and elsewhere in Europe. Chiappini, who produces an Umbrian oil in Fabro to the south, is a member.

MICO’s basic course, lasting a day, costs 160,000 lire, about $105.

The Locanda dell’Amorosa hotel-restaurant, a former 14th century farm complex in Sinalunga, near Siena, organizes tastings, or “degustazioni,” for small groups of tourists generally during the first week of December. Samples of oil are provided at the start of the meal, and each course uses a different oil.

“We want to make the customer understand that every olive oil is different, not just around the country but from town to town,” manager Carlo Citerio said.

Humans have been cultivating the olive for 8,000 years. It was sacred to the ancient Egyptians, Greeks, Jews and early Christians. People used it to read parchment by, to anoint kings, to slick down athletes, to cure ailments. The Bible makes more than 140 references to olive oil. The sprig of the olive symbolizes peace, its wood strength.

Today, the olive and olive oil business worldwide produces $10 billion a year in revenue. Spain is the leading producer.

In the United States, only 6.4% of all the oil sold comes from olives, according to the North American Olive Oil Assn. And of that, less than half consists of extra virgin olive oil.

But that category is fast growing in the United States, with consumption rising about 65% since 1991. Reports on olive oil’s health benefits has brought a surge of gourmet magazine articles and the appearance of bottles of the oil on restaurant tables.

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Extra virgin oil is purely the juice of the olive squeezed mechanically from the olive fruit, unlike chemically refined products labeled simply “olive oil.” It also has less than 1% oleic acid and no additives.

But extra virgin oils vary mightily according to how the olives are harvested and how they are pressed.

The next most determining factor for flavor is the type of olives. Exposure to light during storage reduces quality, as do harvesting methods that bruise the olives. Even smoke or exhaust on the grounds of a factory can affect flavor.

“Oil is like a sponge, it absorbs any kind of smell or dirtiness,” Chiappini says.

Enter the likes of Grappolini, who founded MICO three years ago. He is a third-generation olive oil producer, a zealot for high-quality extra virgin, a crusader against what he sees as mass-consumer tastes.

“The less we pollute our senses with bad food, the better off we are,” he says. “No one tastes anything anymore! That is our problem. The biggest complaint by restaurateurs is not economic crisis, but that people, faced with an excellent dish, with well-chosen ingredients, don’t know what they’re eating. It’s vital to teach consumers the art of tasting. This is fundamental.”

Among the students at the MICO course at Loro are a wine and oil dealer from near Padua in northern Italy, a producer from Calabria in the south and an American importer.

MICO’s curriculum begins with the basic principles: freshness, flavor and consistency. Five oils are tasted, including one with an obvious defect--in this case, an oil with a smell like boiled beans. It came from a cheap supermarket brand, Chiappini says, and he speculates the defect resulted from heating at some point.

Typically saltless Tuscan bread and mineral water clear the palate between each sample.

In the afternoon, we sample six oils blindly under the direction of Grappolini and are asked to rank four according to flavor and two defective oils.

The class agrees only on the most defective--an oil redolent of car exhaust--and on the fruitiest.

We are taught typical oil properties: a bitter artichoke taste, an almond aftertaste that comes from the grinding of the pits, a burning peppery sensation at the back of the throat.

The course goes on to focus on defects and how to detect them, oxidation, methods of cultivating olives and producing and conserving olive oil.

At the end comes a certificate attesting you as a MICO expert, and an educated palate about mankind’s oldest condiment.