Langstaff

Sue Langstaff of Applied Sensory LLC will lead a team of 15 judges at Cal Expo tomorrow as they taste submissions for the 2020 California State Fair Extra Virgin Olive Oil Competition. Becoming an expert in Sensory Science wasn’t a straightforward path for Langstaff, despite some early signs of natural inclination. “I was a strange child,” she said. “I’d take things up and smell them.” She had a particular affinity for the scent of new shoes. “I didn’t know that was kind of abnormal,” she recalled. Langstaff graduated from UC Berkeley with a degree in genetics and her first job out of college was making beer cans for Kaiser Aluminum in San Leandro. This was during the late 1970s and early 1980s and manufacturers were switching the lining in aluminum cans from being solvent-based to water-based. Langstaff’s first job as a taster was sipping apple juice from beer cans to learn if the various linings produced a difference in taste. Fast forward a number of years and Langstaff was at UC Davis thinking she might enjoy becoming a wine maker, but her experience hauling hoses around the Wente Brothers vineyards in Livermore pushed her towards Sensory Evaluation instead. Today she has her own company, travels the world and lives a life of consistent variety. “You never taste the same thing twice,” she said. Along with using her natural senses, Langstaff developed a “Defects Wheel” for olive oil, beer and wine that her website says can assess defects caused by molecules and chemical formulas. As for the State Fair extra virgin olive oil competition, Langstaff says her team’s job will be assigning scores based on objective criteria, such as smell, taste and intensity, and subjective measures, such as harmony and persistence. Asked what she’s learned over the years since sipping apple juice at Kaiser, she said: “I learned that I didn’t know what I was doing and neither did the people who were setting it up. There should be some scientific way to evaluate this and there is.” Contact: Langstaff, sue@appliedsensory.com