Taking the next step – focussing on consumer needs
admin | October 31, 2010The Adelaide Review (www.adelaidereview.com.au) is a monthly magazine which has a strong readership amongst a middle class, middle aged, educated demographic. Their yearly “Hot 100 South Australian Wines” is one of the major projects they undertake each year and has become an important event on the SA wine calendar – and with around 1/2 of Australia’s wines coming from this state it has become very successful with over a 1,000 wines now being sent in for review.
It was with great pleasure then when the Editor of the Review Amanda Ward approached me with the view to publishing an equivalent EVOO version of the Top 100 wine concept. After a lead up of a couple of full page stories on the local olive oil, the tasting was conducted. I headed the team consisting of the flamboyant Lisa Rowntree – one of the major producers of EVOO in South Australia, the eclectic Brian Miller, wine marketer, thinker, sceptic and food fanatic, and the reserved Laurent Pommery, French born and trained (but we didn’t hold that against him), the executive chef at the Intercontinental Hotel in Adelaide.
As a group, we decided to do the unthinkable – we released the 5th horseman of the apocalyse and (shock, horrr) we described the actual colour of the olive oil we were tasting. Consumers want to know it, are keen to comment on it and chefs understand its importance to the appearance of the dishes they prepare. But some far off trade body somewhere tells us that we can’t do it as it doesn’t meet some EU directive – the actual political background to which has been long forgotten, but the lame official pretext for doing so hasn’t. (Sounds like a Franz Kafka novel).
We also suggested some uses for the EVOO’s we were tasting. The inputs from the professional and experienced Laurent to the well versed and imaginative Brian, to the experienced olive oil producer, mother of 5 and super practical Lisa, and err well, me (ok, I wasn’t that useful, but I do know my fresh fish!) synergised to create some interesting recommendations. The value of this exercise probably lies more in the fact that for the first time, an EVOO competition focussed on what consumers have been calling out for. Information of what matters to them. What it looks like, what it tastes like, how bitter and peppery it is, and what you can use it for.
The olive oil reviews can be found here (at the back of the wine section!)
http://www.adelaidereview.com.au/flip_book/HOT100_FLIPBOOK.html.
Unfortunately the olive oil section is at the back of the flip-book so you’ll have to flip through quite a few pages to get there, so I took the liberty of puting up 2 pages to give an idea of what we were trying to achieve. The four oils given here were all excellent. But they were incredibly different in style which in turn resulted in some diverse culinary recommendations. Hopefully we’ll see more attempts at this in the future.