The Valèvida Table
The Valèvida Table
The Valèvida Table is a small, seated extra virgin olive oil tasting hosted around Kansas City. Each edition pairs a guided tasting — where the oil comes from, how to tell the real thing from what's usually on the shelf, and how to use it at home — with a conversation on women's health and the Mediterranean diet, led by a guest expert.
What to expect
- A guided extra virgin olive oil tasting led by Valèvida founder Johanna Marolf
- A conversation on women's health and the Mediterranean diet with a guest expert
- Seasonal food, and a small gift to take home
- A small room — seating is limited, and past editions have sold out
Our first Table
Our first Valèvida Table paired Jessica Love, APRN, FNP-C of Rooted Heart Wellness on women's health and the Mediterranean diet, with a guided extra virgin olive oil tasting from Johanna. Jo Marie Scaglia hosted us at Caffetteria Modern Cafe + Marketplace, and all nineteen seats sold out within a few days.
Johanna Marolf is the founder of Valèvida, a single-origin extra virgin olive oil made from the Grossal native cultivar in the Valencian Community of Spain. She started it after a year of living in València with her family, when she came home and could not find anything on an American shelf that tasted like what she had been eating. She went back for it.
She trained in tasting through the University of Murcia's extra virgin olive oil program — twenty-six hours of formal sensory work in tasting, gastronomy, and pairing — and returns to València every October to source that year's harvest herself from a small family cooperative. The olives are picked green and early, and cold-extracted within hours to preserve the quality.
Valèvida was built around transparency, because most people have no way to know what is really in the bottle. Johanna does independent lab testing and publishes the full lab panel for every harvest — acidity, polyphenol count, and a pesticide screen across more than two hundred compounds — and the harvest date is handwritten on every single bottle by hand.
She is passionate about the gut microbiome and a firm believer in the Mediterranean diet. She runs Valèvida from Kansas City, where she lives with her family. You will find her at the Brookside Farmers Market most Saturdays.