Cécile Le Galliard, Ehud Soriano
Imagine a driver driving near the separation line. Sometimes he/she is almost touching, sometimes just touching a bit. Yet this driver keeps complaining about getting fined by the police, claiming the cameras should be more accurate.
We may agree that the cameras should be more accurate, but for most of us, the better suggestion for the driver would be “just drive in the middle of the road, instead of playing games with the cameras, then complaining about their accuracy.”
After reading the article about the inconsistency of sensory panels (Olimerca), regarding borderline olive oil (some determined they were extra virgin, some determined they were virgin), we would like to give another point of view on this subject:
The organoleptic assessment of olive oil was originally developed as a research tool, linking the result (the oil after the mill) to the production chain. This tool has been pushed to the forefront of fraud fighting since the 80’s and into the 90’s, and has since evolved into an irreplaceable tool for analyzing olive oil quality.
Organoleptic assessment has two main virtues:
1) It uses the human nose as a tool of analysis. Our nose is extremely sensitive to changes in aroma, as its role in evolution is to give us feedback on the safety of the food we eat.
2) It is the most effective tool to analyze backwards the quality of the process since every defect (and even nuances of defects) is connected to a different part of the process. By understanding the defects, a producer can dramatically improve the oil’s quality.
Over the last 30 years, organoleptic assessment has been a key factor in improving olive oil quality worldwide, helping authorities remove so many defective oils from the market.
Indeed, like every other testing method, including laboratory testing methods, it is not perfect. Like every other method, borderline olive oils are tough to assess.
We should remember, though, that a ‘borderline oil’, as the name suggests, is an oil on the border of a defect. It is not yet presenting a clear defect, but the sprout of a defect is noticeable, indicating this oil has zero, or close to zero, shelf-life.
Some olive oils can show off-odors as soon as the bottle is opened, even though all chemical analyses are fully compliant with the extra virgin category. This happens because chemistry and the human nose do not detect problems simultaneously.
Certain defects appear first as smells — slightly fermented, musty, or oxidized notes — long before laboratory values exceed legal limits. The human nose can detect and distinguish an extremely large number* of volatile compound combinations, often at concentrations far below those detectable by standard analytical instruments. This makes sensory evaluation a fast, highly sensitive early-warning tool that detects quality problems before instruments can measure them.
Rather than opposing human judgment, the solution may lie in accepting external support to help decision-making. Analytical tools, data models, or instrumental methods do not replace the panel, but they can confirm, question, or clarify borderline situations.
In other words, instead of doubting the necessity of sensorial analysis, wouldn’t it be much simpler to grow, harvest, extract, and store a better olive oil in the first place? Wouldn’t it be easier to produce better-quality olive oil with all the knowledge and great equipment we have in the olive oil industry?
If we go back to the beginning of the article, wouldn’t it be much simpler to drive in the middle of the road, instead of arguing with the police whether you touched the separation line or not?
*C. Bushdid et al., “Humans can discriminate more than 1 trillion olfactory stimuli”, Science, 2014.
Texte traduit en francais et en espagnol
Relance du débat sur l’analyse sensorielle
El análisis organoléptico debe apreciarse