Croatian Joins Elite Panel of Tasters in New York

One of the mem­bers of the inter­na­tional panel of expert tasters judg­ing entries at the upcom­ing NYIOOC World Olive Oil Competition in April will be Dr. Karolina Brkić Bubola from Croatia.

Brkić Bubola has a long expe­ri­ence in the world of olive oil and has ded­i­cated her sci­en­tific career to it. She’s a senior research asso­ciate at the depart­ment of Agriculture and Nutrition at the Institute of Agriculture and Tourism in Poreč. Other impor­tant hats she wears include as deputy head of the insti­tute’s lab­o­ra­tory for olive oil qual­ity con­trol — which she co-founded, as well as leader of the offi­cial panel for olive oil sen­sory assess­ment of the Republic of Croatia, rec­og­nized by the Ministry of Agriculture and the International Olive Council.

The NYIOOC pres­i­dent and Olive Oil Times pub­lisher, Curtis Cord, invited Brkić Bubola to the elite panel of tasters after an exhaus­tive search process. She is the only Croatian on the team that includes ten women and eight men from thir­teen coun­tries and the first addi­tion to the panel since Suzan Kantarci Savas from Turkey joined the panel in 2016.

Brkić Bubola invited me to visit the insti­tute in Poreč, a medieval sea­side town on the west coast of the Adriatic penin­sula of Istria, an impor­tant olive-grow­ing region. She first showed me around the lab she founded together with her col­league Marina Lukić. Dressed in a long white lab coat and her face cov­ered in a mask, Lukić was busy at work han­dling test tubes and glass beakers. December is a busy time in the lab because har­vest sea­son is over and local pro­duc­ers send in their sam­ples for chem­i­cal analy­sis so that they can legally put ​“extra vir­gin” on their labels.

Next we moved down­stairs to the sen­sory analy­sis test room where the offi­cial panel Brkić Bubola leads con­ducts their tast­ings. Two long rows of par­ti­tioned tast­ing sta­tions lined each side of the room and I spot­ted the famil­iar cobalt blue tast­ing glasses and heat­ing units. She had even pre­pared a short tast­ing ses­sion of sam­ples of local olive oils. We first sat down for an inter­view, and I asked her to tell me about her first olive oil tast­ing expe­ri­ence.

“I grew up in Bosnia and Herzegovina and we did­n’t use olive oil much for cook­ing, only for med­ical or cos­metic pur­poses,” she said. ​“So the olive oil I was used to was not extra vir­gin. I first tasted extra vir­gin olive oil 15 years ago here in Istria. I found some­thing beau­ti­ful in that fresh green odor and bit­ter taste of Istrian olive oil and fell in love. Then when I dis­cov­ered all the sci­ence behind olive oil, a whole new world opened up for me.”

That first taste of extra vir­gin olive oil would be the cat­a­lyst to Brkić Bubola’s sci­en­tific career. While a PhD can­di­date, she joined the insti­tute as a research assis­tant in 2005, even­tu­ally com­plet­ing her the­sis on the char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of olive oil pro­duced from Istrian native cul­ti­vars, which exam­ined their volatile com­pounds and sen­so­r­ial char­ac­ter­is­tics. This was com­ple­mented by a series of spe­cial­ized courses orga­nized by the International Olive Council and a three-month course at Jaén University, Spain, lead­ing to a pro­fes­sional qual­i­fi­ca­tion as an expert in the organolep­tic assess­ment of vir­gin olive oil.

Having tasted olive oils from all over the world and inti­mately stud­ied the cul­ti­vars that are native to Croatia, I asked her to tell me what’s unique about Croatian olive oil and how many vari­eties are cul­ti­vated here.

“Biodiversity is very high in Croatia,” she revealed, ​“and we have lots of autochtho­nous olive cul­ti­vars like Istarska bjel­ica, buža, rošin­jola, and žižol­era found here in Istria, and oblica, lev­an­tika, and plominka in other parts of Croatia.”

“Croatia has two olive-grow­ing regions: Istria and Kvarner in the north-west and Dalmatia along the south­ern Adriatic coast. and they are quite dif­fer­ent. Temperatures tend to be higher in Dalmatia. It has a very long coast­line and olive trees also grow on the many islands of the Adriatic. Oblica is one of the most abun­dant that’s found all over Dalmatia, but there’s also lev­an­tika and las­tovka. It’s dif­fi­cult to know exactly how many vari­eties we have in Croatia. One of our projects here at the insti­tute is to clas­sify these. We def­i­nitely have around 80 and are con­stantly find­ing new geno­types.”

In addi­tion to native vari­eties, Brkić Bubola explained that there are sev­eral Italian cul­ti­vars which have been intro­duced, espe­cially in west­ern Istria, like lec­cino and pen­dolino. ​“These olive vari­eties start to change color and ripen before our own cul­ti­vars. So this is the rea­son why we har­vest the Italian vari­eties first, and then our own. Most pro­duc­ers har­vest Istarska bjel­ica last because this is a vari­ety that changes color later than the oth­ers. Its oil is very high in pun­gency and bit­ter­ness since it is one of the rich­est vari­eties in Istria in terms of phe­no­lic com­pound con­tent next to rošin­jola and kar­bonaca,” she added.

She went on to explain that while each vari­ety gives a spe­cific odor and taste to the oil, the soil and cli­mate are other impor­tant fac­tors that influ­ence the char­ac­ter­is­tics of an olive oil. The fact that Istria is located in the north­ern­most olive-grow­ing region of the Mediterranean influ­ences the taste which can range from mid­dle to intense bit­ter­ness and pun­gency. This is also the rea­son for the high lev­els of phe­nol com­pounds in Istrian olive. Another aspect that influ­ences qual­ity is early har­vest­ing.

We can’t for­get that a good dose of TLC on the part of pro­duc­ers also makes a big dif­fer­ence. ​“The qual­ity of our olive oil is very high because pro­duc­ers take care to pre­vent dam­age to the olive fruits,” she pointed out. ​“People are aware what qual­ity olive oil is and they try to make the best oil they can pro­duce. They pro­tect their fruits and ensure they’re healthy. They har­vest early and press the olives within 24 hours – which is very impor­tant, at mills using mod­ern tech­nol­ogy with two-phase cen­trifuge.”

“The result is olive oil with a low acid­ity level, low level of oxi­da­tion and high polyphe­nol con­tent,” she con­tin­ued. ​“Care is also taken to pro­tect olive oil from oxi­da­tion dur­ing the milling process and after. The oil is stored in inox tanks filled with nitro­gen to keep the oil from oxi­diz­ing. At each step it’s impor­tant to pro­tect the oil from light, tem­per­a­ture and oxy­gen: the three ene­mies of olive oil. When mea­sures like this are taken, the olive oil can be pre­served for up to 18 months and it retains that smell of very fresh young green olive oil.”

“But of course it’s not only mod­ern tech­nol­ogy. I think that there’s also a lot of tra­di­tion and love that local pro­duc­ers put in their prod­ucts,” she added. ​“In Croatia olive oil is mostly pro­duced by small fam­ily busi­nesses and the whole fam­ily is some­how involved in pro­duc­ing that prod­uct, includ­ing chil­dren who help pick the olives, for exam­ple. So it’s not only mod­ern tech­nol­ogy, it’s also the love they put in it.”

In addi­tion to work­ing in the lab and head­ing the sen­sory panel, Brkić Bubola is also involved in sev­eral impor­tant research projects. One is Typicro, funded by the Croatian Foundation for Science, that aims to iden­tify the chem­i­cal com­pounds, specif­i­cally the phe­no­lic and volatile com­pounds which are respon­si­ble for the odor and taste of olive oils and wines pro­duced from autochtho­nous cul­ti­vars found in Croatia. She’s also one of the experts involved in the European Union’s OLEUM project that aims to find bet­ter solu­tions for the assur­ance of qual­ity and authen­tic­ity con­trol of olive oil. As one of the objec­tives of this project is to pre­vent fraud and boost con­sumer con­fi­dence, I asked her if olive oil fraud is a prob­lem encoun­tered in Croatia.

“Since olive oil is an expen­sive prod­uct, it’s sus­cep­ti­ble to fraud all over the world,” she said. ​“I can’t really judge what is the sit­u­a­tion in Croatia because we have quite a small pro­duc­tion and gen­er­ally our gov­ern­ment tests one sam­ple per 1,000 tonnes to check the mar­ket. That means it should test five to six sam­ples but they usu­ally test more and each year they increase that num­ber to pro­tect Croatian pro­duc­ers as well as con­sumers. We rarely encounter the prob­lem of olive oil being mixed with other types of oil. More com­mon is the wrong cat­e­gory of olive oil qual­ity listed on the label.”

My final ques­tion for an olive oil expert who has tasted oils from all over the world was a sim­ple one: Do you have a favorite? Her answer was pre­dictably diplo­matic, con­sid­er­ing her posi­tion as a mem­ber of the panel who will soon declare this year’s best olive oils. ​“If we’re talk­ing about local Istrian vari­eties, I think that our Buža is a very inter­est­ing vari­ety because its oil is very fruity and aro­matic with a bit­ter­ness and pun­gency which appears a lit­tle bit later and increases in inten­sity over time to very spicy and per­sis­tent. But I really like all extra vir­gin olive oils since dif­fer­ent types of olive oil pair well with spe­cific foods. There’s a whole sci­ence behind food pair­ing when it comes to wine and I think that the future is food pair­ing with dif­fer­ent vari­eties of olive oil.”