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I have just taken part in a course to become an olive oil sommelier, and these courses weren’t even around, you know, more than 10 or 15 years ago. Nobody knew how to taste and understand and sort of mark out what a good quality olive oil is because extra virgin olive oil is fantastic as a health product. It has such a stake in history, right back to the Ancient Greeks and everything. And it’s always been used as a vital health element for cooking, for preserving, you know, for good luck, for togetherness. Olive oil has always been there, and I think that people are becoming more and more aware about what they buy, how they buy, the story of where it’s from. And people are much more conscious about what they put in their body and if it’s organic, and they care about the soil because healthy soil, you know, we need that for a great functioning planet. So, I think at the moment it’s actually having a bit of an upturn, and people seem to care a lot more about it, and I think it should become more and more popular. You know, our sales are growing every single year because people are that bit more conscious about what they are using for their cooking, what they’re putting in their bodies, and they want everything to, sort of, be good for them or to be sustainable or to have health benefits. So yeah, I think it’s a growing business.
Yeah, it was a really fun and interesting course. We tried about 80 different olive oils over one week. You learned what notes to taste, and the fruitiness and the bitterness that you feel on your tongue and then the pungency, which is sort of like the spicy flavour of olive oil that you feel down your throat, and then you learn about the defects. To be an extra virgin olive oil, you have to have an acidity rate, so your free-flowing acids need to be less than 0.8 per cent, and we are just below 0.2 in our oil, but if it’s not below the 0.8, then you’re not classified as an extra virgin olive oil. You then go into being a virgin olive oil, and if you have even one defect, which could be … it can be rancid, fusty, musty, it’s muddy sediments. So, you’re learning all about these elements, what they taste like, how to detect them in the oil – and if you have one defect in your supposed extra virgin olive oil, then it isn’t classed as extra virgin and then goes down into the virgin category. So, it was a very informative class to learn about that side of the world of extra virgin olive oil.