Lessons from an olive oil sommelier

Times

14 hours ago

We've all heard of a sommelier, right? The highly trained nose responsible for selecting, pairing and serving wines in restaurants — all based on a deep knowledge of grape varieties, regions, vintages and tasting techniques. However, there's a new breed of sommelier in town, and this time they're not sipping on hearty malbec or assessing the mouthfeel of a chardonnay. Instead, they are all about the olive — olive oil that is.
It's hard to know just how many olive oil sommeliers there are in the UK, but Sarah Vachon is one of them. Through her company Citizens of Soil, Vachon is on a mission to get us to rethink how we use the golden liquid. Founded in 2021 by Vachon and her husband, Michael, Citizens of Soil provides olive oil subscriptions (starting from £15 per month) through its Olive Oil Club — with oils responsibly sourced from across the Mediterranean. It has also grown into an olive oil brand stocked by Selfridges, Fortnum & Mason and Waitrose, among others, and used in some of London's top restaurants (although many Michelin-starred chefs apparently prefer to work with oil from mild olive oil varieties so as not to affect the flavour of their cooking).
The temperature is suitably Mediterranean when I meet Vachon in the City of London office that Citizens of Soil calls home, for a crash course in all things olive oil. She lives and breathes the fruit — even wearing a discreet pendant engraved with an olive branch. It all started on a holiday to visit friends in rural Greece. There the couple fell in love with the complex flavours of the olive oil they encountered, and started to bring some of the oil back as gifts for their friends in the UK and US. Investigating just why this oil tasted better than the bottles on the supermarket shelves, the couple discovered an industry dominated by anonymised production. Citizens of Soil counters that by putting producers — and, principally, female producers — at the heart of the product. The farmers' names are included on each bottle, they are paid above the market rate and are encouraged to use regenerative farming practices. All this has led to Citizens of the Soil being rated a B-Corp (a company that meets high standards of social and environmental performance, accountability and transparency).
The holiday also kick-started Vachon's journey to becoming a fully fledged olive oil expert. She started by gaining experience on the ground. 'I had been doing harvest and gone to mills and had already started doing work days with producers,' she explains over some cups of olive oil. 'I'd reach out to international olive oil judges and pay them to do a workshop just so I could learn.' Vachon formalised her training in tasting, assessing and sourcing the finest oils in the world through a year-long course at one of the principal training grounds for the olive oil sommelier, ESAO (the Escuela Superior del Aceite de Oliva) located in Valencia, Spain. This training allows her to guide and educate others in broadening their olive oil palates. Be prepared to learn the difference between the bold, peppery finish of a Tuscan batch and the green, grassy balance of lesser-known regions like Croatia and South Africa.
There are over 1,000 varieties of olives, from the Tsounati of Greece to the Mission of California, each with its own nuances. 'They can each have different nutritional benefits and flavours and things that they can do,' Vachon explains. 'But also you can take those varieties and you can transplant them to different hillsides of the same area and they'll taste different. It's the same concept we have in wine, this element of terroir.' It turns out that anywhere that's good for growing grapes is also good for growing olives — with South America the next frontier.
The first stage in getting to grips with these nuances is honing your senses. 'Smelling everything really trains you,' Vachon explains as we start the tasting process, 'because if you don't know what something smells like, you can't identify it.' Olive oil tasting uses special cups shaped like mini wine tumblers. These cups are made from dark coloured glass so the colour of the oil is obscured and cannot subconsciously affect the tasting. Blue and red are popular, but Citizens of Soil's next venture, the Olive Oil Clubhouse, uses black. Planted in the heart of Notting Hill from 17th to 28th July, the pop-up Clubhouse will immerse visitors in all things EVOO as the UK's first-ever olive oil bar. There will be olive oil tastings (complete with little black tasting cups), talks from nutritionists, soft serve vanilla ice cream or chocolate sorbet courtesy of cult ice cream brand Happy Endings topped with olive oil, and even complimentary golden-hour cocktails. All this plus a well-stocked olive oil shop.
'Colour is no indicator of quality in extra virgin olive oil,' Vachon says. The shape of the cup is also significant. Much like with wine tasting, this allows the oil to breathe. The tasting begins with us warming the oil with our body heat by cupping the glass with our hands — one on top and one on the bottom — and rotating the glass back and forth. 'This allows the compounds to activate to kick off the flavour and the aromas,' Vachon notes. Although a little heat is a good thing, too much heat is a no-no. 'If someone doesn't package it right or if they keep it in a clear bottle, or keep it near their stove … keeping it near a stove where it's getting heat all the time, even in a dark glass bottle, can ruin an amazing oil.' This is because too much heat accelerates the oxidation process, breaking down the oil's beneficial antioxidant compounds.
Then, we smell. 'The wonderful thing about polyphenols, which are the antioxidant compounds that everyone's talking about, is that you can smell them and you can taste them,' Vachon explains. 'So what I tell people is, look for the smell of life. You need to smell plants.'
We start our tasting session with one of Citizens of Soil's more delicate, Greek oils. It smells crisp and fresh, with herbaceous notes and, to Vachon's expert nose, red apples. 'There's all sorts of things you might smell, but it's the smell of life that you're looking for, because if that's gone away, that means that oil could have a defect or it's no longer fresh.'
Next comes the actual tasting. Again, it's similar to wine tasting. Take a sip — no more than a teaspoon — and aerate the oil in your mouth, allowing it to coat the palate. Do this by sticking your tongue on the roof of your mouth and sucking in air as you splash the oil around your mouth. What you're looking for is an astringent feeling on the palate — maybe a bitterness, maybe a slight sharpness.
The second oil we taste is an intense Spanish oil harvested in November 2024 by Marina Segura Gómez and her father, Manuel (who have been producing olive oil for Citizens of Soil since 2023), available in small batches from their groves in Andalusia. Alongside more tomatoey notes, it's distinctly sharper on the palate than the Greek oil.
One of the markers of a quality olive oil is the acidity level. 'That has to be under 0.8 per cent,' Vachon says. 'We've never brought in anything over 0.4 per cent. Before I even work with a producer, I look at their labs, even from the previous years, because that lets me know the shape that the fruit was in before it went to the mill. How quickly did they get it in there? How clean was the mill? Was the fruit damaged?' In the case of Marina's oil, the acidity is always under 0.2 per cent. That's partly down to the productions methods used — she has a mobile mill, which means the oil can be produced as soon as the olives are harvested.
The third aspect of the olive oil tasting is a pepperiness — 'it could be like a little tingle,' Vachon says. 'Sometimes it's a sharper pepper that'll actually make you cough.'
That's quite apparent in the third oil we taste, a limited-edition Cerasuola olive oil from Syracuse in Italy. 'This year is a little bit punchier just because the climate was so stressful,' Vachon says, 'and when the olives get stressed, much like grapes, they put out more antioxidants and more of these polyphenols.' This in turn means a more peppery taste.
While we mainly associate olive oil with drizzling on salads or frying food — both valid uses — there are also some more inventive approaches. The Spanish oil we taste pairs really well with acidic fruits like mango, or pineapple. Meanwhile, many of the female olive oil producers that Citizens of Soil work with enjoy olive oil on yoghurt with seeds and honey for breakfast — or even blended into matcha.
Citizens of Soil has made a conscious effort to prioritise female-led production and support a new generation of farmers, actively working to partner with farms that are at least 50 per cent female-run. This includes producers Juan Olivares, an agronomist, and Carolina Domínguez, who works with endangered species, in Spain — two friends who have combined their olive groves. Younger women entering the field represent not only essential new labour in an often ageing field but also a cultural and environmental shift in how farming communities are shaped.
This summer, Londoners can experience Sarah's expertise and Citizens of the Soil's products first hand at the Olive Oil Clubhouse, where they can sip on tomatinis served with pan con tomate drizzled in liquid gold, explore pairing olive oil with peaches, and eat on EVOO-infused pastries (the dates of events and offerings vary, check the website for full details and timings). Although this is only temporary, Vachon hopes that it might be the first step on the way to a more permanent iteration — perhaps featuring everything from visiting producers to wellness and skincare.
Find the Olive Oil Clubhouse at 2 Blenheim Crescent, London W11, July 17-28