You Expect Me To Drink That?

Yesterday at lunch, a friend was telling me about a trip to one of those fancy olive oil stores — the kind with a row of stainless tanks along the wall and a little tasting cup waiting at each one. She'd gone in to buy a bottle. They asked her to taste first. She made a face at me across the table and said some version of, I didn't think there was any way it would taste good — like that, alone, on its own.

I burst out laughing. Not at her. With her. Because that is, almost word for word, exactly what was running through my head the first time someone handed me a cup of olive oil and told me to drink it.

The first olive oil I ever tasted was in a Dallas office. I'd been at Deoleo — the world's largest olive oil producer — about two weeks. I knew nothing. Really, nothing. There was a bottle in my pantry at home that I'd had for years and probably never opened. I'd been a vegetarian for a long time, partly because animal oils grossed me out, and the idea of drinking any oil out of a cup was, frankly, not landing well with me.

The US Quality Officer — let's call her Kate — called me into her office. There were already a few small cups of olive oil sitting on her desk. A green apple on a plate. A napkin. No fanfare. She said, "Sit down. I'm going to teach you the difference between olive oils."

I'm sure I made a face. You expect me to drink those? is what I was thinking. But it was week two at a new job and I wasn't going to lead with attitude. I sat.

"Take one. Smell it. Tell me what you smell."

I smelled it.

It was peppery. A little grassy. Something fruity underneath I couldn't name. Actually delicious — which surprised me, because I had no frame for what good olive oil was supposed to smell like. I'd never smelled olive oil before. The bottle in my pantry might as well have been a bottle of dish soap for all the attention I'd ever paid it.

"Now take a big mouthful. Swish it. Don't let it hit the back of your throat yet. Suck a little air through it. Then swallow slowly."

I was still nervous. But I went for it.

The first thing I noticed was how much flavor was in there. Body, depth, layers I'd never associated with the word oil. I aerated it the way she'd shown me, swallowed slowly — and the burn hit. A real burn. I almost choked. I almost spit out the rest. How was oil spicy?

She watched me compose myself and just smiled. "Now — what did you taste?"

I struggled. A lot. I thought there was a right answer and I didn't have it. Eventually I said, "Grass? Maybe banana? And then — pepper, at the end?"

She smiled wider. "Pretty good. This one does have notes of banana and grass. Medium robust. A blend."

We tasted two more after that. By the third I'd learned to brace for the throat-burn and stopped coughing. And by the end of the meeting a door I didn't know existed had been opened. She told me how the soil and the weather and the timing of the harvest and the crops growing alongside the trees all wrote themselves into the bottle. She told me how she trained her palate every weekend by walking through farmers markets, biting into raw fruits and vegetables on their own — no salt, no seasoning — just to memorize what they actually tasted like, so she could recognize them later in oil.

I walked out of her office a convert — and, surprisingly, already looking forward to the next chance to taste a new oil.

I've told that story a couple times now. And every time I do, the person across from me does the same thing my friend did at lunch — pulls a face, half-laughs, says some version of I don't think I'd want to drink it like that.

That reaction, I've come to think, is the door. Not the disqualifier — the door.

Because almost no one walks into their first olive oil tasting expecting to like it. Most of us have been pouring oil out of a bottle into a hot pan our entire adult lives. The idea of drinking it cold, on its own, out of a little cup — that's not how Americans think about olive oil. We don't have the cultural muscle memory for it the way Italy or Spain or Greece does. We don't grow up watching a grandparent drizzle a fresh-pressed oil over warm bread and call it dinner. We mostly grow up with a bottle in the pantry that gets used in pasta and ignored in everything else.

So the apprehension makes sense. Of course you don't think it'll taste good alone — you've never had a reason to think about olive oil that way before.

But then you smell it. And then you taste it. And — assuming the oil in the cup is actually good — something tips. The pepper. The grass. The throat-burn that everyone who's ever coughed after a sip of EVOO will tell you is a good sign, not a bad one. The slow recognition that this thing in the cup is alive in a way the bottle on your shelf at home has never been.

If you've never tasted an olive oil straight, on its own, with nothing on it — that's the thing I'd put at the top of the list. Find a store that pours samples. Or host a few friends some night and line up three bottles in small cups and pass them around — if you want a little structure for it, I made a few printables for home tastings on Etsy (a flavor wheel, scorecards, and a placemat that runs the tasting for you). Smell first. Take a real mouthful. Suck a little air through your teeth. Swallow slowly. Notice the burn.

Apprehension is fine. We've all started there. The cup is still in front of you.