Spain Keeps the Tasting Panel After a Letter From the Trade
Four Spanish olive oil associations wrote to the minister about the way the tasting panel is being used in official checks, and on Wednesday the ministry sat them down in Madrid and agreed that the method stays. What Spain will do instead is ask the International Olive Council to open a working group on how the test is applied along the chain. Here is what was asked, what was agreed, and why this argument is about warehouses more than about tasters.
What the trade asked for
The letter went to the Ministry of Environment, Rural and Marine Affairs from the four bodies that between them cover most of the packaged trade: Asoliva for the exporters, Anierac for the bottlers, Infaoliva for the millers, and Cooperativas Agro-alimentarias for the co-ops. Their stated worry is the way the sensory method is applied in some product checks along the food chain, and the effect a failed sample can have on the producer or the packer whatever conditions the oil was kept in before it reached the shopper.
That is a narrower complaint than the noise around it suggested. It came after a run of cases in which packaged oils sold as extra virgin were found to be a grade lower, the sort of checks we wrote about when a newspaper put Andalusian supermarket oils through a panel. It is not a claim that trained tasters cannot tell fusty from fruity. It is a claim about where in the chain the sample is drawn, and who pays when it fails.
What Madrid decided
Isabel Bombal, the ministry’s director general for food industry and markets, met the four associations at the ministry on Wednesday. On one point the room was unanimous, and it is the point the trade will be quoted on for years: nobody present questioned the validity of the method backed by the International Olive Council and the European Union, and all of them supported keeping it as the way oils are classified at origin on the basis of quality.
The rest was a commitment to work on how it is used. The participants asked for measures that would keep the method to its proper job of defending quality, shore up consumer confidence and create legal certainty for operators. Spain will put a formal proposal to the council to set up a working group, with the administrations and the sector at the table, to look at how responsibility should sit across the operators in the chain.
Why the chain is the real argument
Under the European rules an oil is extra virgin only if a trained panel finds no defect at all and some fruitiness, with the chemistry inside its limits. The Commission restated those numbers late last month when it amended the olive oil analysis regulation: median of defects zero, fruity median above zero, free acidity no higher than 0.8 percent. It is the tasting that fails oils, not the laboratory, because a careful mill lands well under the acidity limit and almost everything passes the chemistry. We set out what that number does and does not tell you in our piece on what extra virgin actually measures.
| Extra virgin, as the rules put it | Limit |
|---|---|
| Median of defects, judged by a panel | Zero |
| Fruity median, judged by a panel | Above zero |
| Free acidity | 0.8 percent or less |
The complication is that olive oil gets worse on its own. Heat, light, air and time turn a clean oil into a tired one, and a bottle that left the packing line as extra virgin can taste like plain virgin after a summer on a warm shelf. That is the packers’ point and it is fair. The growers’ answer is just as fair: if a sample drawn at the shop cannot count, nothing a shopper actually buys is ever tested.
- The chemistry is cheap, repeatable and almost never the thing that fails an oil.
- The panel is the only test that catches fermented, musty or rancid oil, which is most of what goes wrong.
- Nobody in the Madrid meeting asked for the panel to go. They asked for clarity on who carries the risk.
- Panels already run blind proficiency checks between themselves, the way laboratories do.
California has been here in miniature, when an official tasting went badly for the people running it.
Both sides in this argument are right, and neither will tell you the thing that follows from it: the grade on a bottle describes the oil when it was classified, not the oil in your kitchen. Nothing on a standard label tells you how old the oil is or how it was stored on the way to you. Buy dark glass, look for a harvest date rather than only a best before date, and buy a size you will finish inside a few months. That does more for what you actually taste than any ruling from a ministry.