BioFach 2008: Olive oil awards

Every big organic trade fair now runs an olive oil award, some judged by expert panels and some by the visiting public. The two produce very different winners. Here is how to read the sticker on the bottle.

Walk any organic food fair and you will find an olive oil bar: dozens of oils, little plastic cups, a queue of trade buyers, and somewhere a sign announcing an award. Producers from every corner of the olive world turn up — the obvious Italians, Spaniards and Greeks, then Cyprus, Albania, Chile, Australia, and producers from countries most shoppers have never associated with olives at all. The medals that come out of these events genuinely matter commercially. Whether they tell you the oil is good depends entirely on how the judging was run.

Panel judging versus popular vote

There are two ways to run a fair’s olive oil award and they are not interchangeable.

A trained panel tastes blind, from coloured glasses, in a controlled order, scoring for fruitiness, bitterness and pungency and for the absence of defects. Panellists are calibrated against reference samples. They will reliably reject a fusty, musty or rancid oil that most consumers would happily pour on a salad. Their winners tend to be assertive: green, bitter, peppery, high in polyphenols.

A visitors’ vote is a different instrument. It is honest about one thing — what a room full of people actually enjoyed — and it is a decent proxy for commercial appeal. But it is not blind, it is not calibrated, and by the fifteenth cup of the morning almost nobody’s palate is intact. Popular votes reward sweet, mild, low-bitterness oils, and they occasionally reward a mild defect that reads to an untrained palate as smooth. Neither result is wrong. They answer different questions.

If a bottle carries a medal, the useful question is not which fair, but who tasted, and blind?

Award type	Judged by	Rewards	Watch out for
Expert panel, blind	Calibrated tasters, coloured glasses	Intensity, complexity, zero defect	Winners can be too fierce for everyday cooking
Visitor or consumer vote	Fair attendees, open bottles	Smoothness, sweetness, approachability	Palate fatigue; mild defects mistaken for softness
Category-only award	Panel, split by fruitiness class	Fair comparison of like with like	A medal in a small category means little competition
Entry-fee-driven listing	Anyone who paid	Nothing measurable	Stickers that look like medals but are directories

What organic certification actually covers

Organic certification governs how the crop was grown: permitted inputs, no synthetic pesticides or fertilisers, buffer zones, record-keeping, annual audit. In an olive grove that mostly concerns fly control, weed management and fertilisation. It is a real, audited, meaningful standard.

It says nothing whatever about the quality of the oil. An organic olive can be picked late, left in a heap for four days, pressed in a filthy mill and stored warm in a clear bottle. The result is certified organic and thoroughly bad. Conversely, a great many superb conventional oils come from groves that use almost no inputs anyway, because a mature dry-farmed olive grove needs very little.

The overlap between organic and excellent is real but it is not causal. It exists because the kind of producer who bothers with organic certification is often the kind who also picks early, mills fast and stores properly. Buy on the second set of behaviours, not the first sticker.

Where the world’s oil actually comes from

Fairs give a misleading picture of the map, because presence at a stand has nothing to do with volume. The reality of world production is lopsided and has been for a long time: Spain produces roughly as much olive oil as the rest of the world combined, Italy and Greece follow well behind, Turkey, Tunisia, Morocco, Portugal and Syria make up most of the rest, and everyone else — Chile, Australia, California, South Africa, Argentina — is a rounding error by volume, however good their oil is.

That matters for how you read an award. A gold medal from a small, young producing country is a statement about one producer’s skill. It is not evidence of a new olive superpower. The volumes simply are not there.

Reading a medal, practically

• Look for blind panel judging. If the award does not say how it was judged, assume it was not blind.
• Check the year of the medal against the harvest date on the bottle. Producers reuse a sticker design for years; the oil in your hand may be three harvests later.
• A medal in a named fruitiness category tells you the style — intense, medium, delicate — which is more useful than the metal.
• Organic is a farming claim. For quality, read harvest date, dark glass and grade.
• Ignore stickers with no issuing body named. Some are simply paid listings.

Olive oil awards and organic labels: common questions

Does a medal mean the oil is extra virgin?

It should — most serious competitions only accept extra virgin — but the medal itself certifies a ranking on the day, not the grade of the bottle you buy years later.

Is organic olive oil healthier?

There is no reliable evidence that organic olive oil is nutritionally superior. Its benefits are agricultural and environmental. Freshness and grade have far more effect on what is in the bottle.

Why do consumer-voted awards pick different winners than expert panels?

Untrained palates prefer mild, sweet oils and tire quickly, while trained panels reward intensity and reject defects that casual tasters do not notice.

Which country produces the most olive oil?

Spain, by a very wide margin — roughly comparable to the rest of the world combined — with Italy and Greece next.

Should I pay more for an award-winning oil?

Sometimes. A blind panel medal from a recent harvest is a genuine signal. An undated sticker on a bottle with no harvest date is marketing.

Based on standard blind sensory panel methodology for virgin olive oil and the published structure of organic certification schemes.