TABLE TALK #170
Wine gets all the romance.
The labels. The vineyards. The solemn discussions about blackberry notes and wet stones. The books, the documentaries, the weekend trips. Entire careers have been built around explaining why one hillside tastes different from another.
Olive oil, meanwhile, has spent centuries playing second fiddle - slightly unfair really, because if wine is agriculture's great storyteller, olive oil is arguably its oldest co-star.
Today's rabbit hole begins with the suspicion that olive oil deserves a little more of the limelight.
🍝 MAIN COURSE 🍝
The more time spent around either, the more their similarities become impossible to ignore.
They grow in the same landscapes. Often on the same farms. The olive harvest frequently follows the grape harvest. Farmers who make one often make the other. In many corners of Italy, Spain and Greece, they've spent thousands of years sharing the same hillsides, seasons and fortunes.
In many ways, they're siblings separated at birth.
Take terroir. A word beloved by wine people and guaranteed to make everyone else glaze over. The French gave it a fancy name, but the idea is simple enough: things taste different depending on where they grow.
The same olive variety planted on two different hillsides can produce remarkably different oils. Soil, rainfall, sunshine, altitude, wind - they all leave their fingerprints behind. It's no different to wine. Place matters.
Timing matters too. Pick grapes early and you get something brighter and sharper. Leave them longer and flavours become richer and rounder. Olive growers face similar decisions. Harvest early and you sacrifice yield for character. Harvest later and quantity rises, but often at the expense of complexity.
Neither product is simply made. They're grown, coaxed and interpreted
Photo Credit: Ellouze 1870
For most of Mediterranean history, wine and olive oil weren't luxuries. They were the economy.
The Ancient Greeks considered them markers of civilisation itself. The Romans built vast trading networks around them. Olive oil lit homes, fuelled lamps, lubricated machinery, scented bodies, preserved food and found its way into religious rituals. Wine, meanwhile, accompanied everything from celebrations to political negotiations.
Together they helped shape entire landscapes.
And where there is money, there is usually mischief.
Wine fraud is as old as wine. Olive oil fraud is almost as old as olive oil. For thousands of years merchants have been stretching, blending, diluting and relabelling products in pursuit of a little extra profit. The methods have changed. Human nature, less so.
Yet despite all that history, olive oil still somehow feels like the less glamorous sibling. Wine gets the vineyard tours and the tasting notes. Olive oil gets poured over a salad.
But that seems to be changing.
Photo Credit: Ellouze 1870
🍮 SWEET ENDINGS 🍮
A generation ago, most of us were happy if olive oil came from Italy. Today we're starting to ask slightly different questions. Who made it? Which olives were used? Why does one bottle taste peppery and grassy, while another is soft, buttery or almost herbal?
In other words, we're beginning to approach olive oil with the same curiosity we've long reserved for wine.
Which brings us neatly back to where we started. The two have spent thousands of years sharing hillsides, harvests and histories. One just happened to get better at marketing itself.
🍷 WHAT'S NEW
FROM
WEDNESDAY'S DOMAINE? 🍷
Olive oil has been on my mind this week.
Partly because I've been chatting to the team at
Ellouze 1870 and tasting my way through some of their oils, and partly because it's reminded me just how much quality can vary from bottle to bottle. Much like wine, once you start paying attention, there's a whole world to explore.
Ellouze's oils are organic, cold-pressed and single-estate, and the bottles themselves are things of beauty. Should you find yourself in the market for a bottle:
Wednesday25 will get you 25% off.
Perfect timing, given it's the season for the simplest kind of eating - tomatoes, peppery rocket, good bread, a glug of olive oil and a table full of friends.
Until next time,
Luke x