{"id":2261,"date":"2026-08-15T21:33:27","date_gmt":"2026-08-15T19:33:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.latelierdessaisons.ch\/?p=2261"},"modified":"2026-08-19T13:45:36","modified_gmt":"2026-08-19T11:45:36","slug":"extra-virgin-olive-oil-tasting-guide","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.latelierdessaisons.ch\/en\/extra-virgin-olive-oil-tasting-guide\/","title":{"rendered":"Tasting extra virgin olive oil like a sommelier: my guide, my words, my memories"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Extra virgin olive oil tasting is a ritual I learned long before I had a name for it. I’ve never seen olive oil as just an ingredient. As a little girl, it was my game: I’d watch the droplets on my plate, glide, merge, split apart again. In my mother’s kitchen, no dish ever left without a drizzle of extra virgin olive oil, it was a rule, almost a ritual, never optional. To me, it’s a fruit juice, just like orange or grape juice, except today it’s no longer pressed: it’s cold-extracted, below 27\u00b0C, to preserve every aroma. My weekends were spent in the countryside, with family, among the olive trees. That smell of freshly extracted oil, I’d recognize it with my eyes closed. That’s the memory I try to pass on, here in Switzerland, to everyone discovering extra virgin olive oil for the first time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Today, as an olive oil sommelier and member of international tasting panels, I taste dozens of oils every year, often blind. And I can tell you one thing: once you know what to look for, you never look at a bottle the same way again. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Little Ritual Before an Extra Virgin Olive Oil Tasting<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The other detail that changes everything: temperature. You warm the glass between your hands to about 28\u00b0C. An oil that’s too cold keeps its aromas locked in; one that’s too hot simply loses them. A very simple gesture, but it’s the one that truly opens up the nose. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

We always taste from a blue glass, which keeps us from perceiving the oil’s actual colour. It’s not a professional quirk: an oil’s colour tells you absolutely nothing about its quality, it simply varies with harvest time. A clear glass fools the eye before you’ve even smelled anything. At home, a small tinted liqueur glass works perfectly well. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Smelling, then tasting<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Blue<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

I cup the glass with one hand and warm it with the other, then breathe in deeply just above it, as if gathering everything the oil has to tell before it reveals itself in the mouth. The first thing I look for is the fruitiness: green, like freshly cut grass or artichoke, or ripe, softer and rounder, with notes of ripe fruit and almond. Then come the nuances: apple, green banana, tomato, cut hay. Each oil tells a different story just through its nose. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then I taste. A small sip, spread across the whole tongue, drawing in a little air through the mouth to carry all the aromas up to the back of the nose. Three sensations should appear: bitterness, a peppery kick that sometimes rises to the throat and makes you want to cough (a good sign \u2014 it’s the polyphenols expressing themselves), and the balance between the two with the initial fruitiness. A good extra virgin olive oil is a living balance between these three sensations. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The words I use to describe an oil<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Green fruity, ripe fruity, bitter, peppery, balanced: these are the qualities we look for. But what interests me most are the flaws, because that’s where sensory pleasure disappears. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rancid, first: a smell of aged walnuts or varnish, a sign that the oil has aged and become oxidised. Musty-damp, a smell of cellar or mushroom, which comes from mould developing on the olives, often because of storage that’s too humid. Wine-vinegary, that note of wine or vinegar that betrays fermentation. And ‘ch\u00f4m\u00e9’, when the olives have sat piled up too long before being pressed, which completely alters their freshness. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Just one of these flaws, even a faint one, and the oil can no longer be called ‘extra virgin’, even though the term is governed by a strict European standard. In theory, no one can use it without meeting precise chemical and sensory criteria. Before bottling, oils must also be chemically analysed and tasted by a panel of experts. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

What to really look at on a label<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Look at the harvest date, if available, not the best-before date: an oil is best tasted within 24 months of harvest. I look at the acidity level, but also other chemical parameters that I find in the lab analyses producers send me directly, documents most people simply don’t have access to. But I never stop at these numbers: I taste every sample myself, and I choose among my producers’ best batches. I see data a label will never show, and I taste what no one else tastes before you. And I don’t check the origin on a document: I personally know each of my producers, their name, their estate, their family, not just a country printed in large letters on a label. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you’re ever looking for where to buy olive oil in Switzerland chosen with this level of rigour, that’s exactly what I do in my shop: I select, I taste, I check the analyses, and I turn down far more than I accept.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Extra virgin olive oil tasting is a ritual I learned long before I had a name for it. I’ve never seen olive oil as just an ingredient. As a little girl, it was my game: I’d watch the droplets on my plate, glide, merge, split apart again. In my mother’s kitchen, no dish ever left […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"off","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[],"dipi_cpt_category":[],"class_list":["post-2261","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-non-classe"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.latelierdessaisons.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2261","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.latelierdessaisons.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.latelierdessaisons.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.latelierdessaisons.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.latelierdessaisons.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2261"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.latelierdessaisons.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2261\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2283,"href":"https:\/\/www.latelierdessaisons.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2261\/revisions\/2283"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.latelierdessaisons.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2261"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.latelierdessaisons.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2261"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.latelierdessaisons.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2261"},{"taxonomy":"dipi_cpt_category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.latelierdessaisons.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/dipi_cpt_category?post=2261"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}