Four Blue Glasses and One Wrong Label

Sit. Not there, the light's behind you and you'll be squinting at a blue glass all afternoon, which is pointless anyway — sit there. Twenty past one. The lorry is at four and there are four tanks in the shed with three right labels and one wrong one, and until I know which tank is which, nothing goes out of that door. Yes I am annoyed. Eleven seasons I have tasted for this press and nobody has ever mixed a docket on me before, and the boy who did it has gone to his sister's for the afternoon, which is convenient for the boy.

Four glasses. All four oils came off the same hillside, all four picked this side of the New Year, all four sitting on that marble getting warm while we talk. The glasses are blue on purpose. Before you ask: colour tells you what leaves went into the mill with the fruit and it tells you absolutely nothing else. The buyer who comes up from Pireas holds a glass to the window and says, ah, green, that's the good one. He has been sold rubbish twice this year on that basis. Twice. In one year. So we use blue glass and we use our noses and our throats, and I will say each of these once, so listen.

1. Warm it. Fruitiness is volatile. Volatile means it goes up into the air and up your nose, and a cold oil sends nothing up anywhere. Put the glass in the cradle, or cup it in your palm and cover the top with your other hand, and count to thirty. Body heat, no more. You are going to smell a cold glass and tell me it has no smell — of course it has no smell, you haven't given it anything to smell with.
2. Bitter is the tongue. Pepper is the throat. Two different compounds, two different sensations, two different places in your head. Bitter sits on the back of the tongue. Pungency is a cough, and it arrives three or four seconds after you swallow, and it is in your throat, not your mouth. Call the cough bitterness and every single judgement you make after that is wrong, and you won't know it's wrong, which is worse.
3. Never one glass alone. "This oil is bitter" is not information. Bitter next to what? Next to yesterday? Hold two together and tell me which is more. That comparison is worth something. An opinion about one glass on its own is worth nothing and I will not write it down.
4. The apple. Your mouth tires fast. The third sample in a row always reads flatter than it is, every time, on everybody, including me. Bite the apple, chew it, spit if you want, and start again. And at the end go back to the very first glass and taste it again — it will read differently than it did, and that is your mouth, not the oil.
5. Defects come up with the heat. Fusty is fruit that sat in heaps in the yard and started to ferment before it went under the stone. Rancid is air getting at the oil — putty, old walnuts, a tin somebody left open. Cold, you'll walk past both of them. Warm, you can't miss them. And I won't name a defect off one look at one glass — I want it against a clean glass twice before I write the word down.

There is one thing wrong in this flight. One glass out of the four. Not two, not none. The dockets are in the rack. Match them to the glasses, then hit the bell and I'll tell you if you're right. If you're wrong the bell goes twice and you get the papers back — but everything you've learned about the oils stays learned, so the only thing a wrong answer costs you is listening to me ring a bell twice.