No matter what Fil Bucchino does for a living, it seems to involve toting around unwieldy items.
As a member of the punk band Flashlight Brown, it was a bass guitar. Now, as an expert taster, it’s jugs of olive oil.
Bucchino says he has “incredible memories of Halifax” from when he was here for gigs at the Marquee and the Pavilion. This week, he’ll be in Wolfville to screen his documentary Obsessed with Olive Oil at Devour! The Food Film Fest.
The doc, shot during the 2017 harvest in Italy, says extra virgin olive oil is the only food in the world for which tasting (for fruitiness, pungency and bitterness), done via panel test, is used to determine its commercial classification.
An Italian chef in the film says pairing an olive oil with food is just as important as the pairing of a wine, and Bucchino says it’s no longer true that the best olive oil always comes from Italy.
“Absolutely not. A good olive oil is a lot like wine, it’s all about when you pick. It’s like an orange, you want fresh juice. With olive oil, different cultivars will demand their own attention and their own way of harvesting. It’s all about the production method and when it’s done right, every country in the world, every region, can produce phenomenal olive oil,” he said. “We tend to lump it together, but it’s not olive oil, it’s olive oils.”
Obsessed With Olive Oil Documentary Trailer
To become the equivalent of a sommelier in olive oil, Bucchino went through four years of training. For someone interested in becoming more knowledgeable but not making a living at it, he recommends a five-day course.
“Those are great courses to get an introduction to learn the differences among defects, and learn what makes a good oil. You’re looking for the positive attributes and the negative attributes. That’s something I suggest anybody could do to be an informed buyer,” said Bucchino, who went to tasting school in Italy. “We do two intensive weeks a year apart, so that gives you time to go back and taste. Then the following two years there’s a lot if Skype and online sessions where we’ll send samples and treat it like a panel situation. We take oils that are commercial grade, some are good, some are bad, and then we spot all the defects, the positive and negative attributes. Olive oil tasting is an interesting thing because I could tell you that something is great and you could disagree with me and we’re both correct.”
The olive harvest in southern Europe is going on now, and Obsessed with Olive Oil looks at harvesting methods in different countries. In some commercial groves, trees are planted precisely on flat ground so that machines can gently shake the trunks of the trees, causing olives to fall onto nets below.
“A lot of it depends on the terroir, for example if you go to northern Italy or northern Spain where there’s a lot of hills and the trees are planted on steps, like vineyards, you can’t get machines to help the harvest so they’re literally 100 per cent hand-harvested. It becomes difficult to even put the nets down,” Bucchino said.
Varieties of olive oil are called cultivars, and they can be wildly different. Bucchino says it’s necessary to taste each cultivar by itself to figure the best way to use it with food.
“It’s amazing on steak or even on ice cream,” he said. “That has become the rage in my family.”
If you go:
Devour! is in its ninth year, and last year attracted 13,000 people to Wolfville. This year’s festival will include the screening of more than 80 films inspired by food and drink, with the theme Celebrating Italian Food and Cinema.
It also includes dinners, wine tours, culinary workshops and awards ceremonies (devourfest.com) and runs from Tuesday until Sunday.
