Qualifying Your Oil

Qualifying Your Olive Oil

We’ve spoken already about not treating Olive Oil like Wine in terms of “saving it for that special day”. Olive Oil does not get better with age.

When it comes to our taste buds though, we can definitely treat Olive Oil like wine and it makes for a really interesting tasting session. You can distinguish a good Olive Oil by it’s palate and nose, however the colour of an oil has nothing to do with the quality of the oil.  

In fact, at Wilson’s Foods, we taste every single batch that comes in so that we can decide how we will be using the oil. If an oil shows any kind of defectiveness, we won’t sell it. This very simple step has helped us to achieve consistent year-on-year quality.

There are 3 main points we look out for:

Straightforward notes (ie not complex; ripeness of input olives should not vary too much)

Freshness (should smell like a newly-cut lawn)

Robustness

You can tell a lot from just tasting olive oil, such as whether or not there was mould on the olives (fermented), if the olives were cleaned properly (earthy), if the olives were dried out or frozen (hay/woody), musty/damp/stuffy (the olives were left too long after harvesting)

The things you want to taste are Fruity (grassy, herbaceous, floral, buttery), Bitter (acrid taste on your tongue) and Pungent (peppery/spicy aftertaste).

Interested in doing your own Olive Oil Tasting? Follow our easy step guide!