There’s No Such Thing As the ‘World’s Best Olive Oil’

The best olive oil in the world does not exist.

That might be sur­pris­ing from some­one who orga­nizes the NYIOOC World Olive Oil Competition. I’ll explain.

There are some olive oil guides that rank oils with a score, tak­ing their cues from wine guides and their score-happy indices.

The olive oil with the high­est score — say, one that earns a score of 99 — is said to be the ​“best olive oil in the world,” or ​“EVOO of the year.”

Over the years man­ag­ing the NYIOOC, if one thing was clear to me, it was this: one judge’s 99 was another judge’s 95. One panel’s 92 was another panel’s 96.

They are all great olive oils. But the dif­fer­ence between a ​‘blow-your-mind’ EVOO and a ​‘freak­ishly good’ EVOO is an abstract notion that dwells in the depths of an indi­vid­ual taster’s pref­er­ences and there is too lit­tle con­sen­sus among judges and pan­els on oils they rank at the high­est lev­els to pro­claim that the 98 is really ​‘bet­ter’ than the one that scored 97 or 96.

Crafting a high-qual­ity olive oil is an extremely dif­fi­cult task. Every pro­ducer who man­ages to do so deserves to be rec­og­nized with­out unjus­ti­fied hier­ar­chies.

Each year I see the scores of the world’s largest olive oil com­pe­ti­tion, and each year I decline to make them pub­lic because I know that an oil that achieved a score of 82 deserves the same recog­ni­tion as one that scored an 88.

I know that the same panel can taste an oil first thing in the morn­ing and give it a score of 78, and then give the same oil a score of 74 later in the day.

So here’s the thing: There are good olive oils, and there are great olive oils. And even the line between ​‘good’ and ​‘great’ can be a fuzzy one.

In New York, we aver­age the judges’ scores and bestow a Gold Award to those with scores of 80 or higher — a Silver Award for those with scores between 65 and 79.99; no award for the 448 brands in the 2017 NYIOOC that scored below 65.

Does a pro­ducer who man­aged to craft an oil with a score of 79.75 (Silver) deserve as much recog­ni­tion as one who earned a score of 80.15 (Gold)? Absolutely. And that is why we cel­e­brate and pub­li­cize every award win­ner with the same appre­ci­a­tion. These are great oils. The one that would be best to pour over your brus­sels sprouts is your call.

Likewise, I have never felt com­pletely com­fort­able with our Best in Class selec­tion, which pits the high­est-scor­ing oils from each cat­e­gory against each other in a sim­ple vote by the full panel of judges.

For exam­ple, we will line up every Northern Hemisphere organic mono­va­ri­etal that scored over 95. The judges will taste them all at their own pace and cast a vote for the one they think is the best among them.

Even here, there can be con­sid­er­able dis­agree­ment. And did an oil that scored a 93 deserve to be in the run­ning? Yes, and it might have won. Don’t be sur­prised if I even­tu­ally do away with the Best in Class at NYIOOC.

There are even some web­sites out there that scan the world’s olive oil com­pe­ti­tions to see which brands won the most awards to ulti­mately declare the ​“World’s Best Olive Oil.”

The premise is that the pro­ducer who won awards at the most com­pe­ti­tions is nec­es­sar­ily ​‘bet­ter’ than the pro­ducer who entered just one com­pe­ti­tion and earned a Best in Class. A more accu­rate name for the brand sin­gled out on these web­sites would be ​‘World’s Winningest Olive Oil.’

We need truth and clar­ity in the olive oil cat­e­gory, not con­fu­sion. ​“World’s Best Olive Oil” mis­leads peo­ple into think­ing you can actu­ally deter­mine for every­one that one producer’s excep­tional olive oil is bet­ter than another producer’s excep­tional olive oil.

I will accept an expert’s view that an olive oil is great. I will not accept a dec­la­ra­tion that it is the best.

In New York, we call every oil that wins an award ​“among the best in the world.”

“One of the world’s best,” okay.

“The world’s best?” In my book, that’s just more mis­in­for­ma­tion.