Liquid Gold

We all know about wine tasting. Spit or swallow. You may have temporarily forgotten but, if you're mature and British, you'll know the wine tasting competition in Tales of Terror with Peter Lorre and Vincent Price. If it temporarily escapes your memory then YouTube remembers it.

Maggie, who I live with, appreciates wine. One of her many cultural endeavours is visiting bodegas (wineries). She makes me go along even though I'm more beer and brandy man myself - apart, not shaken or stirred Mr Bond. The normal routine is that you pay for a bodega visit and see a few vines, some steel tanks, some big rubber hoses, some oak barrels and, finally, the wine tasting. That's the bit most people, except the designated driver, like best. You get to drink three or four or five glasses of wine from the bodega, usually with a bit of ham and cheese to nibble. There are lots of variations and each of the wineries tends to have a different emphasis. The quality of the explanation and what you get shown also varies, but almost all the flaws are swept away by the wine tasting. Don't think bar though, think education. The tasting session will involve lots of information about what makes a wine better or worse and ideas about the process of wine tasting.

Some time ago, I found out that the Estrella Levante brewery in Espinardo, Murcia did tours and tastings. Now beer sampling sounded more up my street. The tasting session at the brewery was really well organised, with a sort of placemat that had tips about tasting the beer, a scoring system based on several characteristics and other ways of deciding about the quality of the stuff you were pouring down your throat. The placemat wasn't exactly astrophysics, but it certainly added to the audience participation in the tasting session.

Now, wine and beer tasting sound perfectly routine to me, but last weekend we tried something new and went on an oil tasting session. Not, you understand the Castrol type product but olive.

If you're a wine drinker and if red, white or rosé is no longer precise enough you may have got into the habit of asking for the Lithuanian Chardonnay, the Australian Petit Verdot or maybe an Argentinian Malbec. Apparently, it's similar with olive oil. Oil buffs don't just check that it's extra virgin - instead of virgin or refined oil - they worry about the variety of olive. The quality oils are made from this or that olive, and just like wine, or whisky, there is also blended product. The oil we are talking about for tasting is only the best, that's virgin extra; the stuff that is extracted in the first pressing of olives harvested recently and directly from the trees. There are lots of other olive oils that are cheaper and come from the second pressings or use some sort of chemical extraction process, but the pukka stuff, the quality stuff, is extra virgin.

There are at least 1,000 olive varieties. I nearly remember the names of two; Picual and Arbequina. The Arbequina gives a nice, easy-to-use, smooth sort of oil; the Picual is a bit spicier, a bit more bitter. Nowadays, if I'm visiting someone in Spain, I know that olive oil as a gift will go down well, and also that there are loads and loads of mills spurting out quality product alongside the everyday stuff. 

When we went to the Deortegas almazara (oil mill), near Yecla, we tasted oils made from five different varieties of olives - Arbequina, Picual, Cornicabra, Hojiblanca and Frantoio. We also tried a blended oil. Just like the Estrella brewery, this almazara provided us with a placemat with some hints as to what to look for. The oils were presented in little blue glass bowls, and we were told that cupping the glass to warm the neat oil before we drank it would release the full range of aromas. The blue glass is to hide the colour, as there is, apparently, a common belief that the greener oils are better, whereas in reality, it's not the colour but factors such as taste, smell and viscosity that mark the quality. Indeed good oils can vary in colour from light yellow or gold through to geen. It simply depends on the variety, time of harvest, and the region where the fruit is grown. Once we'd drunk the oil, we also tried the same oils on good white bread. The idea is that bread is the most neutral carrier for the oil. It was noticeable how the bread affected the taste.

We've done lots of oil mills in the region before, and we've often sampled their wares, but this was the first time that we've done a structured cata (tasting). I thought it was good fun. I also thought how interesting it would be for visitors. An added plus was that unlike the wine catas, where I always seem to be the driver, on this occasion I could join in without worrying about causing accidents or taking breath tests on the way home. So a good activity for Methodists as well as vegans.

The photo at the top shows the fanlike attachment that goes around the olive tree which acts as a net to catch the fruit when the tractor shakes the tree.

The almazara we visited was Deortegas though I'm sure there are many more.

And just how do you get to be extra virgin?

I find it vaguely amusing how the Italians seem to get there first. Here the tiny strong black coffee is called a solo but buy one in Teignmouth in Devon or Alberona in Foggia and it'll be an espresso. Expensive British coffees have Italian names. Another example is Spanish ham, the Jamón Serrano. Commonplace here but, when I want to describe it to visiting Britons, I find that I need to describe it as Parma ham so they know what I'm talking about. Spaniards by the way call the British floppy boiled ham York Ham - jamón York.

Spaniards are often particularly narked about oil. Oil in Spain means olive oil. The default is olive oil. If, for some strange reason, you want another type of oil then you have to be specific - corn oil, sesame oil etc. Even if the Mediterranean Diet is besieged on all sides by hamburgers, pizzas and kebabs the oil is still an essential part of the Spanish diet. Obviously enough it's easy to buy Spanish oil here but it's not difficult to buy Italian oil. What upsets Spaniards is that they believe, and it's true, that lots of the oil sold as Italian is actually produced in Spain. Spain produces about 45% of the World's olive oil and Italy about 20% but, again, Italian oil has a much better reputation than Spanish oil so the Italians can sell more than they produce. To meet demand the Italians buy olive oil from other places and bottle it up as Italian. I should say that the saffron producers of Novelda do much the same with product from Iran but I'm Spanish nowadays so we'll have none of that disloyalty.

We have an oil mill, an almazara, in our village, in Culebrón. From sometime in November through to as late as January lots of local producers, from Britons and Dutch residents with baskets of a few kilos of olive through to local farmers with trailer-loads of fruit, queue up to sell their olives to the mill. Watching the process it all looks very straightforward. Onto conveyors, through presses and into bottles. The oil from Culebrón isn't sold in nice bottles with nice labels. It's sold in big five litre plastic bottles with a very basic label. The last time I looked it wasn't even labelled as extra virgin (that's the one that's just cold pressed fruit) and I'm sure it would be if it were so there must be either second press or processed oil added. It is, though, a good product at a very reasonable price.

I haven't really noticed the price recently but, over the years, we've paid between 13€ and 20€ for five litres of Culebrón oil.  The price goes up or down each year dependant on the quality and abundance of the crop. What always amazes me when we pop over to the bodega to get a few bottles of wine is that other people are buying the oil in industrial quantities. I presume that some of it is for restaurants and the like but Spanish cooks do use a lot of oil. All you need to do is to watch any cookery programme or go to get a cheap meal (which will be dripping with the stuff) to see how.

There's a newer oil mill inside the Pinoso boundaries called Casa de la Arsenia out Caballusa way. Their marketing strategy is completely different to Culebron's. They do sell oil in mid sized two litre containers, either organic or not, at around 6€ or 7€ per litre but their marketing goes into the classy looking half litre heavy, opaque green glass bottles with gold lettering and a strange name. One variety uses the arbequina olive which has a very light flavour and the other uses picual which has a much more intense taste. The price on their website is 12.50€ for the half litre bottle. So five litres of that oil would cost 125€.

Last year we went on a wine and oil trail in Yecla. We had breakfast at an oil mill, a mid morning snack at one winery and a sweet course at a second bodega. Interesting and inventive sort of day. The oil mill, Deortegas, had several different oils most of them based on different olives but there were also some flavoured with, for instance, wild mushrooms. The usual thing when tasting oil is to dip bread into it but we talked to a couple of blokes who were tasting their oil directly from glasses. The bread changes the flavour they said. Spaniards take oil seriously.