A few years ago in Rome, I found myself in a cramped room drinking olive oil from a cup. I was with a group of food writers, learning how to properly taste olive oil before traveling to the hilltop city of Perugia, where we would put our new tasting skills to work at an annual event celebrating Italy’s best artisan extra virgin olive oils. But first we needed a better understanding of the magical culinary ointment that we’d be sampling.
We weren’t walking around dipping bread in bowls of oil as you do in tasting events that steer you toward a purchase. This was a serious effort to understand the complex properties of a fine, extra virgin olive oil, aka EVOO. To this end, we finished each sip with a loud, drawn-out slurp called a stripaggio.
