Take my wine, I’ll survive. Take my olive oil, I’ll get by. Take them both… I don’t even want to go on.Fortunately, there was no shortage of either at Tarry Market last weekend in an olive oil class with Nicholas Coleman, Chief Oleologist at Eataly. Oleologist? Think Master Sommelier of olive oil. In fact, I related most of what I learned during the class about olive oil to wine, discovering some serious parallels between the two essential delicacies.Coleman stated the main contrast: wine must be made, while olive oil is simply waiting in the olive to come out. Otherwise, you could easily have substituted ‘wine’ for ‘olive oil’ in the class conversation and had it all still make perfect sense.Olive oil and wine are agricultural buddies, today and in history. Both originated out of Asia Minor and spread throughout the Mediterranean to quickly became vital commodities. They now piggy-back great cuisine and good living!As we followed Coleman’s instruction to slurp and cough to taste (nobody did this well), I kept hearing the wine parallels:*An olive tree likes to ‘struggle’ a bit like grapevines. The same infertile soils and draining conditions of vineyards are conducive to your choicest olive trees regions.*Olives come in various varieties. Certain varieties are best suited in certain areas and soils.*Olive trees and their clones can be propagated in new areas, like California. There’s a New World learning curve to understand which varieties do best in which regions.*Terroir can be expressed in olive oil.Coleman has a palate that identifies terroir. Much like a Master Sommelier of wine performs mind boggling blind tastings, an oleologist is challenged with sixteen different sensory tests, where they organize olive oils by smell into a lineup with a range of intensity of defects. Blind wine tasting is challenging... this seems impossible!The standout of the night was Coleman’s own olive oil from Grove and Vine, which he co-founded with Dan Amatuzzi, the Beverage Director at Eataly and an alum of Del Posto, Jean Georges, Babbo and Otto. Their website admits both of their "serious addictions to olive oil and wine.” Grove and Vine offers fresh, recently harvested, custom extra virgin olive oils sourced and blended by Coleman.And fresh is the word and the major difference and olive oil and wine consumer must understand. If you’re ever invited to your friends’ for dinner and they brag of their 1994 Tuscan olive oil, go to a restaurant.
