Most of us learn to taste olive oil by accident, if at all. We dip bread, decide it is fine, and move on. Producers do it differently. They taste oil the way a coffee roaster cups coffee: small amount, warm, slow, with full attention. It takes about two minutes, and it works on any bottle in your kitchen.
What you need
A small glass or a ceramic cup, about a tablespoon of oil, and a quiet minute. Professional tasters use dark blue glasses so the color cannot bias them. At home, any small glass will do. A wine glass works well because the bowl holds the smell.
Warm it and smell it
Pour a spoonful into the glass. Cover the top with your palm and hold the glass in your other hand for a minute, swirling gently. The warmth of your hand releases the aromas.
Lift your palm, breathe in, and take your time. Fresh oil smells alive. Look for cut grass, green tomato leaf, artichoke, green almond, sometimes a hint of banana skin or fresh herbs. If you smell almost nothing, the oil is either very old or very mild.
Take a sip, then draw in air
Sip about a teaspoon and let it coat your whole mouth. Then do what feels slightly rude: purse your lips and slurp, pulling air across the oil. The air spreads the oil into a fine mist and pushes the aromas up behind your nose, where most of what we call flavor is actually detected.
Now pay attention to three things, in order.
Fruitiness
This is the oil tasting like the fruit it came from. Green fruitiness reads as grass, leaves and unripe tomato. Ripe fruitiness is softer, more like apple, banana or sweet almond. Early harvest oil, picked while the olives are still green, leans strongly to the green side.
Intensity
Next comes a vibrant, green intensity on the tongue that builds for a few seconds. It is a mark of young fruit and careful handling, and in a high polyphenol oil it is part of the pleasure. It settles into a clean, lively finish, never harsh or metallic.
Pungency, and the cough
Pungency is the peppery catch in the throat, sometimes strong enough to make you cough once or twice. It comes from a compound called oleocanthal, which is present in fresh, young oil. Our lab report measured 157 mg/kg of it in MIELA, which is why the back-of-the-throat pepper is easy to notice. If a tasting gets a cough out of you, the oil is doing what fresh oil does.
You can read more about the lab numbers on our science and lab results page.
What a defect tastes like
Knowing what is wrong is the fastest way to become a good judge of any oil. There are three common ones.
- Rancid. The most common problem. It smells and tastes like crayons, old nuts, putty or stale peanuts. It comes from oil that is old or has been stored badly. Once you have learned this one, you will spot it in cheap oil across the supermarket.
- Fusty. A muddy, stale, sometimes cheesy or compost-like note. It happens when olives sit in piles or bins for too long before pressing and start to ferment.
- Winey or vinegary. A sharp, sour smell like wine, cider or vinegar, from olives that fermented before they were milled.
A flat oil with no smell, no intensity and no pepper is not defective in the same way, but it is tired. Good extra virgin oil should have something to say.
How early harvest tastes
Olives change as they ripen, from green to purple to black. Picked early, they give less oil, but more fragrance and more bite. An early harvest oil usually smells of grass and green leaves, tastes bright and intense, and finishes with pepper. Ours, made from Koroneiki olives, is a good example: fresh-cut grass first, then a green intensity on the tongue, then a strong peppery finish.
It may surprise you the first time. It is closer to a fresh green juice than to the mild, buttery oil many of us grew up with. Give it three or four tastings and it tends to become the one you reach for.
A simple routine
- Pour, cover, warm for a minute.
- Smell: grass, leaf, herb, or nothing?
- Sip and slurp.
- Note the fruit, the green intensity on your tongue, the pepper in your throat.
- Ask whether anything smells of crayons, mud or vinegar.
Try it with the oil you already own, then with a fresh one. The difference is usually clear within a sip. If you would like to taste an early harvest oil with a published lab report, you can find our 500 ml bottle here.
