I love olives!

I did something the other day that I'd neither done nor thought of doing before: I went to an olive oil tasting.

I met a very nice young man named Alejandro, a local importer of artisanal extra virgin olive oils, who took me through a "flight." That's the term for a successive tasting of numerous samples, from lightest to most flavorful. It was very much like the "flight" shown in this picture.

I'd been to wine tastings and single malt tastings before, so I had some idea of what to expect. Still, I learned quite a bit I hadn't known before.

First of all, the color of the oil has little or nothing to do with its taste. In fact, at professional olive oil tastings, the samples are tasted out of cobalt blue tasting glasses so that the tasters cannot see the color. And as you can see from the picture, they all look remarkably similar. We tasted ours from clear plastic disposable cups.

The proper way to taste an olive oil is to pour a small amount into a tasting vessel of some sort and cup it in one hand while you cover with the other. Then you swish it around like wine or brandy. The purpose here is to warm it up and awaken its aroma. Then you sniff. Then you take it into your mouth, swish it all over your pallette, form your mouth into a closed-teeth, open-lipped silly grin and suck in some air. If you don't look like a complete fool at this point, you're not doing it right. Then you swallow, and as you do, exhale vigorously through your nose. Ahh!

Taste is determined by quite a few factors: the variety of olive, when in the season the olives are harvested, the sort of soil in which the trees are grown, the altitude, and the weather, to name but a few. During drought years, the trees produce fewer olives, but they tend to be very concentrated in flavor.

Alejandro categorizes olive oil tastes in this way: "Mild and delicate" are the lightest (the designation "lite" on olive oils, in addition to being crudely misspelled, refers to taste, not caloric content); "Fragrant and fruity" come next; then "Olivey and peppery," which are stronger in terms of their olive odor, and begin to exhibit the sort of pepperiness that bites you at the back of the throat and makes you cough; and finally, "Green and grassy," the boldest of the bold, sometimes described as "assertive" and "hard to ignore."

When cooking with olive oil, the idea is to pair mild oils with mildly flavored ingredients and "green and grassy," sassy oils with sassy, more boldly flavored foods.

As with wine and whisky, olive oil can be a blend of multiple varieties or it can be made from a single type of olive. It can also be a single "cuvee," which is like a single cask, single malt - made not only from a single variety, but also a single pressing of that particular olive.

Olives and their oil are good for you, especially "extra virgin" olive oil, which earns that distinction by having been pressed within 48 hours of harvesting, as I understand it. The longer the wait to be pressed, the more the olives oxidize, and the more acidic the olive oil becomes. One of the oils we tasted, a blend from California, is pressed in situ within 2 hours of harvest! Remarkable! Olives are a good source of anti-oxidants, which act like anti-inflamatories, which helps to explain how Italians who dine on pasta and cheese can live such long, healthy, happy lives. The key is in the olive oil - and the wine, and the tomato sauce. A perfect balance, really.

There are approximately 600 different species within the olive family. The olive is a holy fruit with a longstanding relationship to the western religious traditions. The acclaimed olive trees on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem are said to be over 2000 years old. Which is actually really young. Athena was said to have given the olive to the Greeks and the tree on the hill at the Acropolis is said to be from the rootstock of the original tree. That's old.

The Greeks and Romans used to annoint their athletes with olive oil and the Greeks and Jews both so annointed their kings. The prophet Muhammed told his followers to cover their bodies in olive oil. The holy oil of the Christian tradition is often olive oil.

The best picture of olives that I found while surfing the web was taken by a Scot named Eric Elliott on his travels in Marrakech, Morocco. A man and a million olives. A beautiful picture! You'll have to check it out yourself:

http://www.trekearth.com/gallery/Africa/Morocco/photo34082.htm

It's amazing, isn't it?

Just in case you're interested in buying me a selection of artisanal extra virgin olive oils for Christmas or my birthday, I'll help you out by providing you with Alejandro's website:

www.AlejandroAndMartin.com

Yum.