Last Updated on April 2, 2024
“I want you to take a tiny sip,” Ron Plunkett said.
A sommelier by training, Plunkett was guiding my olive oil tasting at IL Fiorello Olive Oil Company in Fairfield, CA.
“Pretend you’re sipping ramen soup, just a little bit of a slurp, just enough to help this spread across your mouth.”
I follow his instructions, tentatively sipping from one of the shot glasses filled with IL Fiorello’s olive oil. It’s a little bitter, and it tickles the back of my throat. Small coughs come from the group of fellow travelers gathered around the wooden table.
“Those are the polyphenols in the olive oil,” Plunkett said.
He explained that the oil interacts with specific taste buds in your throat, causing you to cough.
“We actually look for that. We call it the pungency.”
A few more coughs erupt around the table.
I make an entry in my notebook: pungency = good.
About IL Fiorello
Located about 45 miles from San Francisco and 30 miles from Napa Valley, the international award-winning IL Fiorello Olive Oil Company is on a mission to produce the finest quality organic artisan olive oils — and to educate the public. Since opening, the owners and staff have hosted nearly 25,000 tasting sessions.
The guided olive oil tastings teach visitors how to taste and evaluate olive oils. Like wine grapes and wine, each variety of olive produces an oil with a different flavor, consistency and pungency. The sessions also demonstrate how to pair oils with bites of food.
During the tasting, Plunkett dispelled a few misconceptions and introduced us to a balsamic reduction drizzled on gelato. In one short hour, I learned more than I had ever imagined about olive oil.
The tasting session began with introductions, including a video prelude to IL Fiorello Olive Oil Company’s organic farm and oils. The video provided a bird’s-eye view of the more than 3,000 olive trees, the gardens, the olive mill and the visitor center.
Owners Ann and Mark Sievers fell in love with olive growing and oil production while visiting Italy. As a result, Ann learned everything she could about olives and put it to use at IL Fiorello, named for the olive trees’ little white flowers.
Nearly 20 years later, the organic, sustainable farm produces international award-winning extra virgin olive oils and balsamic vinegar reductions flavored with fruit also grown on-site. The farm grows 13 varieties of olive trees from Spain, France, Italy, Greece and Tunisia.
Cooking classes, mill tours, a farm shop and olive oil tastings all encourage visitors to learn more about the product.
What is Extra Virgin Olive Oil?
Extra-virgin olive oil is extracted from crushed olives without using heat or chemicals. Extra virgin is the name given to the highest-quality olive oil.
A lab and a certified olive oil tasting panel determine whether an oil meets that level of quality. The lab ensures the oil is pure and checks acid levels and polyphenols.
“The higher the polyphenol count, generally speaking, the more robust the olive oil is,” Plunkett explained.
The tasting panel ensures there are no defects in flavor. If the oil passes the taste and chemistry quality checks, then it receives certification as extra virgin olive oil.
The California certification process is one of the most stringent in the world, and olive oils that pass, such as IL Fiorello’s, bear a certification seal on the label.
Tasting the Oils
With that in mind, we turned our attention to the shot glasses on a tray in front of us. Our tasting featured five samples: three extra virgin olive oils, a co-milled olive oil, and a balsamic reduction. The steps in olive oil tasting are similar to wine tasting. With Plunkett’s guidance, we began the tasting process.
1. Warm and swirl. We warmed the shot glass of olive oil between our palms, then swirled it to release the aromas. Scents can range from peppery to fruity, with more than a dozen aromas in between.
2. Smell the oil. “There’s no such thing as a wrong answer,” Plunkett explained, encouraging us to take a big sniff. To me, the first sample smelled like … grass. “One of the big descriptors we use in extra virgin olive oil is grassy, like fresh-cut grass,” he said. “The other descriptor we use, believe it or not, is that it smells like olive oil. That is actually a real term.”
3. Taste the oil. We each took a little slurp, and that’s when the coughing started. It was bitter with plenty of pungency. Remember those polyphenols? Amid the coughing, Plunkett explained that pungency is a sign of the good stuff. “All oils that have been cut with inferior oils have virtually no pungency. They’re bland,” he explained. “The more it interacts with your taste buds, the more pungency it has, [and] generally the higher the quality.”
Our first sample was Arbequina, a Spanish variety that, to me, tasted somewhat bitter and a little grassy and green. The tasting notes stated that it has flavors of “grass, herbaceous, green almond, green olive and artichoke.” At least I got the “green” part right.
4. Swallow the oil. Most of us had already swallowed, but those who were better at following instructions now began coughing, too. That’s the pungency, and that’s good. Exhaling through the nose allows for a second round of aromas.
Comparing Olive Oils
We followed the same process for the next three samples: warm, swirl, sniff, sip, and swallow.
The French blend contained a balanced mix of extra virgin olive oils from three French varieties, and the Leccino, a lightly scented, Italian variety of extra virgin olive oil almost burned the throat and prompted another spate of coughing.
“Out of the first three, this has probably the highest polyphenol count,” Plunkett noted. “It’s a little bit more pungent,” nodding approvingly at the coughing around the table.
The fourth olive oil sample was a co-milled oil, meaning fruit had been added and crushed along with the olives. In our case, that fruit was lime, resulting in an oil with a fruity, intense limey flavor. Plunket explained that co-milled shouldn’t be confused with oils flavored with extracts or infusions.
“If you’re in the grocery store and you see lemon or lime or white truffle flavored olive oil, it is added flavor, or a lot of times it’s a chemical,” Plunkett explained. “This has the actual ingredient in it. IL Fiorello produces seven co-milled olive oils, including Eureka lemon, jalapeno, and mandarin orange.”
By now, our group had gotten the hang of tasting olive oils. The final sample, however, wasn’t olive oil. The shot glass was full of a thick, sweet balsamic vinegar reduction flavored with figs grown on the farm.
Ann Sievers buys balsamic vinegar from Italy, cooks it down to a syrup — that’s the reduction part — and adds fruit. She makes eight different balsamic vinegar reductions, including one with blackberries and another with strawberries.
Rich and a bit fruity, the fig balsamic vinegar reduction could add flavor to ice cream, chicken or just about anything.
“Think of it like a barbecue or teriyaki glaze,” Plunkett suggested. “It’s really, really fun to use in the kitchen and during cocktail hour.”
Pairing Olive Oil with Food
Now that we’d tasted the olive oils and balsamic vinegar reduction, it was time to pair each sample with food. Five tiny bites were set before us, one for each sample in the shot glasses. The grassy Arbequina flavored the risotto, while the French blend and herbs added punch to a few white beans. The Leccino with a bit of sea salt dressed a portion of pasta and the co-milled lime olive oil added a bright note to a spoonful of pumpkin.
It was all simply prepared and delicious – and nobody coughed.
Adding olive oils to food completely changed our perspective of their tastes.
“The olive oil isn’t as intense now because you have food that you’re working with,” Plunkett explained. “It’s gonna kind of bring everything together.”
And the fig balsamic vinegar reduction? That appeared atop a creamy olive oil gelato, made especially for IL Fiorello. It was divine.
The Milling Process
A video on the olive oil milling process at IL Fiorello rounded out the tasting. The harvest begins when Ann Sievers decides the olives are ripe and ready to harvest (about 70% green and 30% black). The mix of green and black olives offers ideal fruit, aroma, bitterness and pungency.
The mill can process five tons of olives per hour, and each ton produces 35 to 40 gallons of oil. In addition to its own olives, IL Fiorello mills olives for nearly 300 other growers. The olive oil milling process goes something like this:
1. Harvest day is also milling day.
2. Stems and leaves are removed, and the olives are washed.
3. The olives are ground to a paste in the crusher.
4. The paste goes into the malaxation tank, where it’s churned and softened.
5. The first centrifuge separates the oil from the paste.
6. The second centrifuge clarifies the oil.
By the end of my visit, I knew to pass on any extra virgin olive oil that isn’t certified or, at the very least, fails to list the variety and country of origin. Likewise, flavored and infused oils probably don’t have great quality.
Color doesn’t matter, but taste does, and each variety has its own flavor characteristics.
Coughing is good and a sign of quality. I also learned that I needed a bottle of IL Fiorello’s fig balsamic vinegar reduction. Maybe two.
Ann Sievers, however, had one more bit of wisdom to impart before we left to tour the gardens.
“Don’t ever eat an olive off the tree,” she advised. “Never, ever do that. They are terrible, horrible, bitter, awful things. The magic is in the milling.”
