How a Garden Party Became OlioAtlas

Last May I was planning a garden party — evening, long table outside, candles down the middle, a jazz trio (my kids' piano and guitar teacher's band) coming to play into the night. The kind of thing where most of the guests didn't know each other yet and I knew the conversation would need a little help finding its legs.

So I decided to add an olive oil tasting.

I'd hosted these for friends and family before, and they're a wonderful hosting event — the kind of thing that turns a room of strangers into people leaning across the table comparing notes. Is that pungent or more floral? Anyone else getting tomato? Did the burn in the back of your throat last as long for you as it did for me? Olive oil is shockingly good at this. You hand someone a small cup, they sip it expecting to know what's coming, and they're surprised by their own mouth. People talk after that.

I sourced five oils I was excited about — different regions, different harvest styles, a couple of single-estate bottles I'd been wanting an excuse to open. I started writing up the tasting notes on the kitchen counter the night before, and at some point I thought, let me just find a nice printable to hand everyone — something that walks them through how to taste, leaves room for their own notes, and looks like it belongs at this table.

I could not find one.

I looked everywhere. The wine-tasting templates didn't translate — olive oil is its own thing, with its own vocabulary and a sequence to it (warm the cup, smell, sip, swallow, let the burn happen) that wine flowcharts don't cover. The olive oil ones I did find were either clinical lab sheets or pretty-but-empty Pinterest aesthetic with no actual structure inside. I wanted something that would teach someone who'd never done this — I don't know what I'm supposed to taste for, what's a normal note, am I doing this wrong — without making them memorize a process or sit through a lecture before they sipped. I wanted it to be beautiful, because the table was beautiful, and I wanted them to take the card home.

I bought a sub-par option that came closest, ran it through Canva, edited what I could. The cards were ready. The oils were sourced. The table was almost set.

The party didn't happen. The Tuesday before, I had to cancel for reasons I'm keeping off this page, and the Saturday came and went without the table I'd been planning toward. The cards stayed in their envelope. The oils stayed in their bottles.

The printable bothered me for the months that followed anyway — because that gap, between what existed and what should have existed, didn't make sense. Olive oil is one of the oldest sensory traditions in the world. It deserved better than an underwhelming PDF.

This year I started planning the party again — same idea, same friends, the table I'd been picturing finally getting set. The printable problem was still sitting there, so I made my own. A few card variations, designed to do the work I wanted them to do — teach without lecturing, structure without stiffening, look like something you'd want to keep. Then I thought, other people are probably hitting the same wall. So I put them on Etsy.

That's where the second idea showed up.

I was halfway through laying out a tasting card when it occurred to me: what happens to these afterward? People fill them out at the table, the conversation moves on, and — what — they go in a drawer? Get tossed? That's how it always goes with paper notes. You have a lovely moment with five oils one Saturday and a year later you can't remember which one was the ripe one with the floral finish you couldn't stop pouring.

Goodreads is one of my favorite apps for exactly this reason. Books are the same problem in slow motion: you read something that moves you and twelve months later you can't remember the protagonist's name. Goodreads gives you a way to keep your reading life. To go back. To say what was that book my friend recommended in 2019, the one with the lighthouse and actually find it.

There is no Goodreads for olive oil. There should be.

So I started building one. The very best version I could. Somewhere you can save the oils you're tasting, the ones you want to find, the ones you've fallen for, the ones you didn't like and want to remember not to buy again. A way to keep the notes from your tasting party and the impulse buy from a trip and the bottle a friend brought over for dinner — all in one place, all yours, none of it stranded on a paper card in a drawer.

That's what OlioAtlas is now. The Etsy printables are the in-person experience. The app is what happens after — the journal, the memory, the running record of your own taste developing over time.

I didn't expect the project to grow this fast, but the more I work on it the more I see what it can be. A way for people to host the kind of tasting party I love hosting, without having to do the work I had to do to set one up. A way to keep your own sensory history. A way to find the friend who also loves a pungent Tuscan, or the one who got really into single-estate Moroccan presses, and trade notes. A small, real community around something that mostly happens in scattered moments — a meal, a trip, a pour over warm bread — that deserves a place to live and grow.

Most of us don't grow up around olive oil the way the rest of the world does. We're working with maybe one bottle in the pantry, picked up in passing, opened occasionally. There's a whole sensory world inside that bottle that most of us never get introduced to, and it's not because anyone's keeping it from us — it's just that nobody has handed us the small cup yet.

That's what I want OlioAtlas to do. Hand you the small cup. Help you host the party. Keep the notes when you do. And give you a place to come back to as your taste keeps developing — because once it starts, it really doesn't stop.

If you've ever stood in front of the olive oil shelf wondering what the difference actually is, or hosted a dinner and wished there were a way to make it more than just dinner — that's who I'm building this for.

I'm so glad you're here.