The Picual Controversy
This brings up one of the great debates of the olive oil world, the infamous Picual controversy. Picual oil
tastes and smells fusty to trained olive oil tasters, or more specifically, like classic over-ripe, fusty Picual. For
anyone used to American supermarket oil, the flavor of classic Picual is very familiar. This variety accounts
for 80% of the six million acres of olives in Spain. It is a popular olive for good reason: it is very hardy, easy
to pick, high in easily extracted oil and prolific. Why the bad rap? In a sense, Picual is a victim of its own
popularity. Because there is so much of it planted, only a small fraction of it is harvested at its prime.
Traditionally, Picual is picked slowly and steadily until it is all harvested. This can take months. And the
same quality that makes it easy to harvest also makes it prone to falling off the trees if disturbed. Rotten
olives are not left on the ground, they are picked up and tossed in with the rest of the fruit. The result of this
is an oil with a very distinctive flavor described kindly as “eucalyptus.” It is actually a combination of the
defect “fusty” and the inherent over-ripe varietal character of the olive.
In Spain this is a familiar flavor and it is embraced as the flavor of Picual. In Italy, it is equally familiar, and
scorned as the flavor of Picual (but Italians still buy lots of it and use it to make refined olive oil or to sell to
Americans). The true flavor of Picual is actually fantastic; harvested at the right time and treated well, it
produces a glorious, rich, fruity olive oil with a great balance of bitterness and pungency. There is no trace of
the curse of the overripe Picual. But since that “classic Picual” flavor so familiar to the Spanish, they don’t
necessarily regard it as a defect. There are Spanish producers who have gotten wise about this and now
produce superb Picual oils, but boatloads of “traditional” Picual are still produced as well. Because so much
of the olive oil on American supermarket shelves is either this Picual or something else fusty, most
Americans are accustomed to fustiness. One of the attendees at a sensory evaluation course (who had an
extraordinarily acute sense of smell) embodied it perfectly when she smelled the defect “fusty” and confided
that she thought that was just the smell of olive oil.
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