Getting Well Oiled

There is, in Monóvar, just down the road from us, a restaurant that I rather like. As soon as you are at the table, the server brings a chunk of bread and a serving dish with black olives—on one side, the typical and renowned Empeltre variety from Aragon, and, on the other, a serving of olive oil from one of the well-respected almazaras, or oil mills, with a quality mark. It reminds me of the wide variety of Spanish phrases that suggest that with oil, bread, and wine, one will never go hungry. Born and bred Spaniards that we are, we soon order the wine. It’s a splendid start to the meal, one of those reminders that good food doesn’t have to be fancy food. Though I have to say that what comes after is usually pretty fancy!

I suspect that some Spaniards may drink olive oil. In fact, I know that for a fact. At an event in Yecla, the man next to me was doing just that. “Dipping bread into the oil adds a variable,” he said. Olive oil is just a fact in Spain; it’s something that simply happens. When we were in Teruel the other week to watch the eclipse, we stayed with friends, and one of them prepared some sandwiches in case we grew faint with hunger during the 90-plus seconds that the earth was plunged into darkness. “You can’t beat a roll made with good bread, ham, cheese and oil,” she said. If you were talking about a sandwich in the UK, would mention be made of the butter? I think not.

At our local bodega and almazara—winery and oil press—people often buy four or five of the five-litre bottles at a time. It’s like my mum used to buy a hundredweight of spuds. She knew that they would get used, and bulk buying saved time and money. And even after the price of oil skyrocketed last year, it’s still not an expensive item. A litre of branded extra virgin at the local supermarket costs a bit under 6€, and supermarket brands are around 4.50€ per litre. Olive oil is used for cooking, for toast, and for dressing salads, but it has tens of other uses: as a treatment for hair, a skin moisturiser, a shaving aid, a make-up remover, and a polish for wood and leather, to name just a few. My mum used butter on the bumps on my head, and Jack used vinegar and brown paper, but Spaniards would reach for the oil.

Until relatively recently, oil was oil. Nowadays, of course, in the days of niche marketing and of “authored” products, there are myriad mills that churn out a specialist product made from any of the tens, nay hundreds, of varieties of olive. The first test is the bottle. You need to make your product stand out if you are going to charge several times the price of the standard product. The label should be impressive. Obviously the oil will be unsullied, extra virgin, cold-pressed, with nothing but mechanical processing, that's an important part of that eye catching label. It’s particularly good if you can say the olives come from thousand-year-old trees—olivos milenarios. They're not usually really that old, but they are old, massive trees and some are really, really impressive. More gnarled and wrinkled than Keith, Mick, Charlie, and Ronnie put together.

And just to rewind a bit, why was that man drinking oil, and why was I there? We were all on an ecological wine route. So if it were wine, why were we sipping on oil? Perhaps the organisers thought that drinking wine at nine in the morning was verging on alcoholism, though, to be honest, I’ve been to plenty of early-morning events where the wine has flowed freely. Particularly for older Spaniards, red wine isn't booze, it's simply a drink. But our abstemious organisers chose a fry-up at an oil mill, rather than wine, to start the day, and the oil from the mill was there for the tasting as well as the medium in which the bangers were cooked. From there we went on for a mid-morning snack in a winery, lunch in another winery, and sweet, pudding, afters or dessert in a third. The normal oil-tasting method is plain white bread dipped in the oil, but the man alongside was a purist.

Actually, we’ve done it too. It’s not difficult to find almazaras that do tasting sessions. The one we did was in Yecla; in fact, it was the same place we had breakfast, Almazara Deortegas, but on a different day, in a different year, with a much more select group. They put the oil in blue-coloured tasting glasses to hide the colour, because there’s a bit of a myth that the greener the oil, the better it is. The blue glass hides the colour, so you’re left with taste and smell. We tried several varieties of oil, including some with added ingredients—mushrooms, I vaguely remember in one. It was pretty cool, I thought. It’s an obvious move, though. The almazaras put a lot of effort into producing high-quality oil, designing the bottle and the label, so the next step in maximising their return is to have tours and tastings, which usually lead to people buying the product directly rather than at the end of a long, profit reducing, supply chain. I think Olimendros and Casa Pareja over in Jumilla both offer oil tasting, and Bodegas Francisco Gómez near Villena may do too, but their website is a bit vague.

I recommend the tours, and when—if—you’re in Spain, there’s always the fun of trying all the different varieties from the different types of olive. Very soon you’ll be able to drone on about it in the bar or boozer just like me. Sup up!