It is well known that olive oils are the only foods whose legal control must also involve sensory evaluation, and that a harmonised protocol is used for this purpose: EEC regulation 2568/91 and an IOOC trade norm of the 1990s introduced a standard method among those used to assess the quality of virgin oils, after which a modified method known as the ‘panel test’ was developed and adopted, firstly by the IOOC and later by the EEC. One problem in applying the panel method often depends on the lack of reference standards for training judges, in addition to, in some cases, a lack of exact knowledge of the origin of some defects; for these reasons, several judges have suggested the unification of some defects, even when these originate from different kinds of problems. In this paper we have applied headspace analyses to a number of samples of oils that were also characterised by a panel.
